Glitch hits kill switch on app web hosting, citing 'bad actors' and worse architecture

Three years after confirming its acquisition by Fastly, Glitch is pulling the plug on its app hosting platform. Glitch project hosting and user profiles will be shut down on July 8, although user dashboards will remain available until the end of 2025, giving users time to download their code and set up redirects for project …

[An_Old_Dog]

"Bittersweet"

Hey, Mr. CorpSpeak Happy-Talk Person: check your dictionary for the definition of "bittersweet." There is no sweetness in this for your soon-to-be-former customers.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: "Bittersweet"

Or is there? Maybe the customers are secretly grateful for the incentive to move to a different platform, if the existing one is so poor.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: "Bittersweet"

I'm not looking forward at having to retool the site I use it for; being stuck on Node 16 was annoying, but other than that, it was pleasant to use. (Has anyone got a good alternative for node+sqlite in private data?)

[Pascal Monett]

"evolving to reflect reality"

The reality is that you just can't count on the Internet or Internet corporations.

When enough of these shenanigans have happened, business and people will come back down to the truth : host your own servers, make your own backups.

It's the only way to be sure.

[Roland6]

“ the company's legacy architecture compared poorly with the competition.”

Be interested in knowing more about this. Was this due to a lack of investment in product development or simply picking an architecture and technology that has been superceded.

Otherwise this sounds like a potentially successful (and profitable) business deciding to pull the plug because it hasn’t been wildly successful.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Re: “ the company's legacy architecture compared poorly with the competition.”

AFAIK the situation is unchanged from https://support.glitch.com/t/node-versions-on-glitch/71299 :/

Where do you go for free Node hosting now ?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad Actors was mentioned

Glitch is commonly blocked by many corporates, as a lot of malicious sites hosted on it.

So, what could have been a useful tool for prospective script jockey front end developers to host a site to showcase their skills was not really viable if likely to be blocked at corporate level & no use for coding skill demos in prospective job applications (e.g. often asked for site(s) to prove your front end coding abilities, pointless to host on glitch if interviewers cannot access it from the interview due to corporate security policies).

So, I wonder if that "bad reputation" was more impactful than them running a quite old version of node (as generally you don't need the "latest & greatest" version of node to throw a site together, unless you are treating it as a learning exercise & want to use some of the more cutting edge features)

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: Bad Actors was mentioned

"you don't need the "latest & greatest""

Trying to get compiled plugins to work with it could be a nightmare - specifically better-sqlite. (And the latest node has got builtin sqlite support so doesn't need better-sqlite.)

[Franklin]

Well, that makes my day easier

Honestly, I'm surprised anyone ever used Glitch for anything except Amazon and Bitcoin phish sites. Oh, and the occasional Netflix phish sites. I've seen so many phishes hosted on Glitch that for a while I was on a first-name basis with the folks answering their abuse emails.

And fsck me, their defenses against phish sites was piss-poor. They'd take down three identical phish sites and a week later, a bit-for-bit identical phish would be live at a different address. You'd think that any site whose title tag said "Log in to Amazon" would be spotted immediately, but no.