Busy day for the deadpool. Earlier today we had to drag a startup out of there, and now three others are tumbling into it (although one might still be saved in time).
Here’s a quick overview:
- Ziff Davis property and popular game-centric file download service FileFront is closing down on March 30 due to the “current economic conditions” and this after 10 years in operation. Users have only a couple of days left to retrieve their files before the website is indefinitely suspended.
- Cruxy, a nearly 5-year old provider of marketing, monetization and analytics tools for digital creators ranging from film makers to music artists, is calling it quits too. Its founders claim to be ‘exhausted’ and admit that the service just didn’t get enough traction to justify keeping it alive. They’re pulling the plug on April 1.
- If you’re a fan of documentaries, this is bad news for you: Documentary-film.net, an under-the-radar quality video documentary hosting service with a small but loyal fan base, is unable to cough up the necessary money for decent hosting infrastructure. The website has long been among the top results when searching for ‘documentaries’ and ‘documentary’, so I’m convinced someone out there recognizes the value of it. We’re deadpooling it, but it still has a shot.
By the way, the farewell messages from the latter two victims of the recession give you a good insight on what it’s like bootstrapping a labour of love service and then being forced to shut it down, so consider it recommended reading for aspiring entrepreneurs.
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“decent hosting infrastructure.”
In a month or 2 the the url my name is hyperlinking will be offering free Akamai style CDN to all.
We invite documentary-film.net to contact us to get their project back online at high availability. soeet.com@gmail.com
When pirates face stormy seas they go to the torrents! And they come back when the treasure is valued more. Assuming that there was value, till things become a bit stable, they could use one of many CDNs. Some suit out there has to have a fragment of his heart left in him.
WHere are the crunchbase profile links?
In a little over a month we will be offereing free cdn high availability service for http and video.
Documentary-film.net can contact soeet.com@gmail.com if they are interested in being a launch client
sorry about the double post. The varnish reverse proxy TC uses seems to be caching my posts. My apologies.
Stop spamming dude. That varnish is not an excuse for your spams.
FileFront?! No way! I have been using it to download (Legal) MMOs for ages!
… I guess the economic crisis is powerful enough to even pull… Drag down a company that has been operating for 10(?) years.
shed a tear for filefront
If anybody has a startup and can’t afford the bandwidth or server cluster anymore. Myself and my team will host it for you on a 20 server cluster in NYC and Los Angeles for frickety free.
This isn’t a trial offer, you will not have to pay. You will get paid. My company is now aiming at being the Google of Akamai, and we are determined to get as much content on board before launch as possible.
Thanks!
contact the email in the first comment for more information.
What is your ‘company’ exactly Chris? And people will get paid to host with you?
Google of Akamai? Oh, I get it now… moving on.
This company let’s people leave adwords that have not had successful campaigns and monetize with our cloud ISP instead.
A. You leave Google. <– bye, bye Google
B. You come use our services <– hello advertisement free computing cloud
C. You get paypal and or check payments from us
D. You no longer pay your hosting bill.
We pay for all the overhead and we’re going to start with 2 small factor gigabit pipes but will grow fast.
There will be an FAQ on the website along with promotional videos and statistics this spring.
What? Might want to re-think your business model.
I think you would have problems hosting filefront with their “Over 1.5 million files totaling 48+ TB of space”, a world of warcraft patch they are hosting is almost 1gb in size and has been downloaded 400,000 times.
Our bandwidth is unmetered. File hosting is not supported at this time, but may be in the future.
Flv, ogg, ect.. video sharing websites and content are definitely supports.
let’s should have been lets in my last comment.
sorry about the typo
“Flv, ogg, ect.. video sharing websites and content are definitely supported.”
you can contact us now, or you can sign up at the public release in mid May.
You write this here but don’t link to your company in your name?
And Chris, nothing is ever free so as we say here in New York City, what’s your shtick?
I think he might mistake 10 accounts at dream host’s ‘unlimited plan’ for a CDN.
If you want pictures or video of the servers that will be used for the LA division just let me know.
I will be happy to snap a few pics for you.
That said, I will not go through the process of doing that unless a customer wants to see. We’ll have photography of our equipment on the website for potential customers to mull over.
Like I said, I am not against snapping some pics right now with TechCrunch in the background for posterity if you’re a large site who’s teetering on signing up but want to see our gear first.
Filefront is a surprise, but not a shock…the economic climate is just that bad right now.
Wow @ filefront… never woulda seen that one coming…
Sad to see them go
Sad to here about Cruxy. Jon and Nate are two of the best people in the business. They’re bound for greatness together.
How quickly the technology changes!
5 years ago, each app hosts their databases and servers. Today, they can’t afford to maintain it.
Today, a new business can choose cloud computing – avoiding capex and often skipping opex. With lower burn-rate, businesses can sustain much longer.
Of course, there is much more competition. Those who succeed depend on strategy and software intellectual property. Work smart and the rewards are waiting. Ignore the deadpool based on antiquated methods and ideas.
Cruxy was the first major media service to launch on Amazon S3 and we quickly began using EC2 and SimpleDB when they became available.
Just because something is in the cloud doesn’t mean its free…. it just works better!
On average startups last less than two years before they shut down. I guess these startups are a sign of the times that it is hard to keep any business running. Congrats to all of you and this should feel like a success for beating the norm.
If you want to read more about Cruxy and Documentary-Film as well as other failed startups visit Startup Revival
I used to work for FileFront. Great group of people, I’m very sad to see it go. I know they absolutely loved what they did and their community.
Anyone have information on the bandwidth usage of filefront? Would be interesting to know how huge it is.
Bandwidth is cheap these days if you now where to
find it. Maybe they don’t have the resources to grow.
whatever the price of any ressources needed for a business, the other thing to have is money given by ads or customers…
I had never heard of Cruxy before. I went to their site because of this piece. It seems like they had created a service that a lot of people would have been interested in… but who knew? They never made enough news out there in the broader UGM world. Perhaps a few more dollars spent on marketing or at least a better viral approach would have yielded customers and revenue streams. It’s a shame.
And how many of these are April Fools jokes? The Cruxy one has a suspicious date chosen for closing their doors…
Filefront still going strong. The below is taken from the filefront website:
FileFront has been acquired by the original founders of the site and will NOT be suspended as previously announced. This is NOT an April Fool’s Joke.
After learning about Ziff Davis Media’s plan to suspend FileFront at the end of March, the original founders of FileFront made the decision to buy it back from Ziff Davis Media.
We’re happy to announce to the gaming community that as of today, April 1st, 2009, FileFront is a completely independent company again and is no longer part of Ziff Davis Media. All previously suspended services should be active and working again. We thank Ziff Davis Media for their cooperation and willingness to keep the site and community alive.
Due to the very unfortunate timing of this event and related announcements on March 24th and April 1st (April Fool’s Day), we’d like to make it perfectly clear that:
1) 1) The March 24th announcement about FileFront suspending its operation was NOT an early April Fool’s joke.
2) This announcement about the original founders buying back FileFront from Ziff Davis Media is also NOT an April Fool’s joke.
3) We’re making this announcement on April 1st because the deal was completed today and we want to bring all services back online immediately.
4) We would NEVER suspend FileFront as an April Fool’s joke.
5) We are happy to be back!
FileFront has existed in one form or another (originally as FileLeech and Voodoo Extreme’s downloads) since 1997. In the last 12 years, FileFront has become the gaming community’s most comprehensive and trafficked library hosting millions of files for thousands of games while requiring no registration and providing uncapped download speeds. We look forward to improving FileFront and serving the gaming community for years to come.
Welcome home. Game On!