The Dear John letters to soldiers out on the front lines can hardly be compared to that of letters to websites where the host dis-continues the service. However it kind of throws a spanner in an otherwise safe-haven, a place you can call home. The hardest thing about keeping a popular website online is the hosting, popularity frequently kills, where the amount of hits and bandwidth drastically over-weigh the costs (banner clicks etc etc) more and more hosting/ad companies are pulling out as the Internet community ever widens, the latest casualty is GURU3D.
Thanks to goofydave for this one, taken from our Back Page News forum. Well I had been following this for the last week or so when our affiliate MaxReboot dropped me a note to say that Playnet was forced to drop its member services, effectively closing down a number of good sites. MaxReboot were lucky enough to find a new host, GURU3D were not.
The Webmaster Hilbert Hagedoorn decided after 5 years to throw in the towel. The reason (in part) can be read below:
"...However, I"m tired .. tired of switching to new servers constantly, tired of seeking new hosts and mostly tired of working on the site constantly. Being chief editor on a site like Guru3D.com is basically a one man operation when it comes to content. 90% of the workload is being done by me. I have a normal daytime job, the past two years my day starts at 05:15 each morning and starts with the site, when I return from the normal job I continue with the site, usually I stop at 20:00, that"s 75 hours a week excluding the weekends which I mostly used to write up articles and do research on new products which then totals in 85+ hours of work weekly."
R.I.P GURU3D :( another major site bites the dust.