Two websites I let die: TechSalvos and EventShare.in

So on 4 May I emailed a total stranger, again, asking him to name a price for a domain which used to be mine. No reply yet. The domain is eventshare.in and it’s the second website I have let die. The first one was TechSalvos.

BitSnapper is the one still standing and this year I’ve been posting here every few days. But before I get too comfortable, let me tell you what happened to the two before it. :)

TechSalvos: “still in beta mode”

On 21st March 2011, a few months into first year of engineering, I posted this on Facebook (and through it, on Twitter): “guyz check it out..my website…!! plz leave your comments n suggestions :) its still in beta mode”. The link preview had the tagline: “Your Gadget Guide | Gadget Reviews | Free Downloads | Specifications | Prices | Glossary”. Yes, all of that!

That Facebook post got 42 comments and a school friend offered to write reviews right there in the thread.

The site had already been posting for two weeks by then. The oldest post I have is from 7th March 2011, about LG launching the Optimus 2X and Optimus Black in Singapore. Six days after the launch post I was already sharing a “Top 10 budget Android phones in India” list.

The homepage on 13 April 2011, logged in to WordPress. The byline on the HTC post is blurred.

The folder I built it from is very much a first-year student starting a blog in 2011, lol. Next to the logo files there are two theme zips called MobileGadget and MobileNews, a trial installer for some logo-maker app, and PDFs with names like “UntoldAdSenseFacts” and “HighestAppreciatingKeywords”. Yup.

And boy, did I write a lot! Between my last full backup and what the Wayback Machine caught, I can account for 204 posts:

Month	Posts
March 2011	53
April 2011	61
May 2011	20
June 2011	32
July 2011	10
August to November 2011	17
February to May 2012	11

That’s more than a hundred posts in the first two months, mostly launch news and spec sheets, and then it tapers off. Two of the longer ones are the Nokia E6 review from July 2011 and the CyanogenMod 9 preview I ran on my LG Optimus One in February 2012.

The hosting fight

TechSalvos ran on a one-year shared cPanel plan from a small hosting company, which cost me almost 8k. In the third week of August 2011 the site just stopped opening. I logged into cPanel and the 10 GB monthly bandwidth was all used up. I messaged support through their panel. No reply. The new month reset the bandwidth, nobody raised the limit, and by 21st September I was halfway through it again. The site loaded only after six or seven tries and cPanel showed the server load in red: 9.86 on 8 CPUs!

So on 21st September I wrote to their info address with the subject “WHY WON’T ANYONE REPLY ????”. That address bounced too. -_- Then I dug out the email of someone senior there from their Facebook page and forwarded it to him.

He replied about an hour later, and not kindly. A slow site isn’t only about the server, he said: manage bandwidth with plugins, stop any blackhat practices, turn on hotlink and leech protection. He also didn’t like my tone. Fair enough. The next morning I apologised for the tone, said I wasn’t doing anything blackhat as far as I knew, explained that people hadn’t joined the site because of the server problems, and asked for a number I could call.

That same day, 22nd September 2011, I took a full cPanel backup of techsalvos.com and a dump of the WordPress database. On 28th September the domain’s name servers changed. In December the hosting account sent a disk usage warning (421 of 500 MB used) and in January 2012 I moved the domain to a new registrar.

Almost every TechSalvos post up to that point survives only because of that one backup.

“Need some #Editors”

By 2012 I was in second year and the posting had slowed down to a trickle. On 30th April 2012 I tweeted: “Need some #Editors for my website ie. http://t.co/FsXPntrM I’m not able to manage it all alone :( i’ll bear all server cost and share profit”. A friend replied and I offered to make an editor account for them once I knew they were familiar with WordPress.

The last post I have is from 18th May 2012, a list of ten free Android games.

The site still had a bit of commercial life after that. Advertisers had emailed about banner space in September 2011, and in September 2012, months after my last post, another one actually paid for a banner over PayPal!

Googlebot can’t access your site

In January 2013 Google Webmaster Tools started emailing an old Gmail address of mine:

• 17 January: Googlebot can’t access www.techsalvos.com, 2 errors in 24 hours
• 18 January: 188 errors
• 21 January: “Increase in server errors”
• 26 January: 797 errors in 24 hours
• 28 January and 5 February: more “Increase in server errors”

The Facebook page, “Techsalvos - Ultimate gizmo guide”, was stuck at about 179 likes and its weekly reports showed a reach of 0 to 3 people most weeks. I never brought the site back. In February 2014 I moved the @Techsalvos Twitter account to a new email.

EventShare.in: one more site, final year

In January 2014, in my final semester, I started something else. On 22nd January I registered eventshare.in, “Sharing Tech Events, Seminars & Conferences!” It was a WordPress site listing tech events in and around Delhi, sorted into events, webinars, workshops, seminars, conferences and hirings. I mentioned it briefly in my DVLUP post.

The Facebook banner I made for it.

This time I built more than just a blog. It had a webmail address, a Twitter account (@eventsharein), a Facebook page, a Facebook app and a Mailchimp list. Every listing followed the same template, which is still sitting in a text file on my old laptop: Description, Who Should Attend This?, Why Should I Attend?, About the Speaker, Agenda, Event Details (venue, date, time), Fees, Register.

The first listings went out within a week. On 29th January 2014 I tweeted the Geeklist Hack4Good 0.5 hackathon, and on 30th January the C# Corner Annual Conference 2014. The site’s folder has dozens of event posters: Microsoft’s Cloud OS Roadshow, Nokia’s “Your Wish Is My App”, a GDG hackathon, DevFest at IIT Delhi, a BlackBerry developer meetup, Intel’s AppFest for Android, and plenty of college fests and workshops. When I wrote to a company about a job at the end of January, I listed EventShare.in right next to BitSnapper as web work I’d done.

Most of those posters are from January and February though. The last one is from 7th July 2014. From September 2014 the Facebook page’s weekly reports show reach mostly in single digits.

Letting it lapse, then trying to buy it back

The domain expired on 22nd January 2015, a year to the day after I registered it. The registrar sent expiry notices on 23rd and 27th January, and I didn’t renew.

On 20th April 2015 I asked Facebook to rename the page from EventShare.in to Bitsnapper.com. Same day, I looked up the domain’s new owner with a reverse WHOIS and emailed him. I told him I hadn’t had the time to renew it, that I could see he wasn’t using it, and offered to pay nominal transfer charges to get it back.

A couple of hours later he replied: sorry, they don’t buy domains to sell. I said that was a shame and thanked him. A few hours after that he wrote back asking for my offer price. Wait, what?

I didn’t have one! I had never bought a domain from a person before. So I asked him to quote a price, and pointed out that it was a parked domain with no page rank and that a .in isn’t worth what a .com is. I said I wasn’t going to pay a premium, and offered to design him a website in return for letting it go at transfer cost.

Then nothing. I chased on 24th April, and again on 4th May with a single ”?”, which reached him empty. He said he got a blank email, so I told him to see my previous mail and quote a price. That’s where it stands right now. The Wayback Machine shows eventshare.in as a parked page at the end of April.

What I’m taking from this

Neither site died on one particular day. TechSalvos went from 61 posts in a month to none, then to Googlebot errors, over about two years. EventShare.in went from a folder full of posters to single-digit reach to an expiry notice I ignored, all in a year.

So, for BitSnapper:

• I’ll renew the domain even when I’m not using it. A renewal is cheap, and getting it back from someone else costs whatever they decide, if they answer at all.
• I’ll take backups before something breaks, not the morning after a fight with the host.
• I won’t put a growing site on a plan with a 10 GB bandwidth cap and a support desk that doesn’t answer.
• And I’ll stop reading the like count as an audience. 179 likes came with a weekly reach of zero!

Lesson learnt, the hard way. Have you ever let a site or a domain go and regretted it later? Do share below! :)