Ask HN: What Happened to Svbtle?
I use https://svbtle.com as a blogging platform about once a month. The past couple of days it has returned a 503 [1]. Nothing came up on Twitter or Google about them having an outage. I don't know how to figure out what's going on. I've never considered backing any of my content up because of the svbtle Promise [2]. I'm hoping it comes back up so I can at least backup/migrate my content.
[1] https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/svbtle.com
[2] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LXB7R6sD2i4J:https://svbtle.com/promise+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d
47 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread> We promise to do everything in our power to ensure that any content you publish on the platform will continue to be available on the web forever, at the same permanent link, as long as you want it there.
If the company stops existing, there is no "We" anymore so realistically, they don't have to continue trying. If all of them gets hit by buses (or all by the same bus), I think it's reasonable to say they did everything they could in their power, but their power is now non-existing so probably you content will be soon too.
I always had a sort of genial skepticism of Svbtle: I liked the idea, but there was something a bit...for want of a more gentle term, a bit blowhardy about Dustin Curtis's own writing style, and like others, I was bemused by that "forever promise." It's impressive, but how can you guarantee that? In fact, it doesn't guarantee it, precisely, based on the footnote of the linked content:
> “Forever” means until the HTML-based “web” is no longer generally accessible or until Svbtle or its parent company becomes financially insolvent (which we intend to avoid given that users pay for the service).
(Emphasis added.) Many years ago I signed up for the "lifetime hosting" at TextDrive, which turned out to really mean "until the parent company went all-in on managed enterprise hosting"; Joyent's management appeared to be somewhat surprised and irritated that we expected "lifetime" to mean "if not our own personal lifetimes, then at least as long as your company is in business". Svbtle clearly tried to do better, and I don't doubt they meant it, but it's still a big ask.
Having said that, I also suspect it's basically a one-person business, so goodness knows what's up. Is there a customer service email address? Have you tried emailing "hi@dustincurtis.com", which appears to be Dustin Curtis's email address?
As far as Svbtle is concerned, this appears to just be small operation downtime which is the poison you've chosen if you go that way. Can't say there's any "forever guarantee" that really means much. The best you can get is that if you sign with Oracle they'll guarantee to ratchet up that dependency to charge you more and more over time. Hard to beat that as an incentive for uptime.
While I wouldn't excuse any bad behavior, that is a point in Joyent's favor...
https://groups.google.com/g/nodejs/c/lWo0MbHZ6Tc
(I remember, after TextDrive fell apart, making a rather sardonic blog post observing that if I were heavily involved with Node, I would be making contingency plans.)
if i host my own then it's easy to just have an automated backup of the database or the static files. but on any online tool it depends on the APIs that are available. if there is RSS i could find an RSS download tool, but if not then it would most likely have to be manual copy-paste which you have to remember to do and is quite inconvenient if you are on the road.
but if you use svbtle, medium or substack or any other hosted platform, how do you back up that?
*Waves hands frantically* over here that's me....and it is just one reason I keep talking myself out of blogging.
and saving that whole html page instead of the actual text also produces a very messy result. have fun restoring that.
Svbtle's most obvious original competitor/inspiration, Medium, appears to have at least rudimentary export capabilities, and it's has a publishing API for years -- I could write an article in an editor that supports its API, like Ulysses, and publish right to it. Of course, I could also write an article in any editor and just copy and paste the Markdown to Svbtle, and then just...save my articles in their original form. This has been the way I've written anything much more considered than, er, replies on HN for many years, and it doesn't require whatever I'm publishing on to have any concept of an API whatsoever!
the best solution would probably be a prompt in the web-editor of the site to save your text once you are done writing it. like publish and save in one step or something like that. and a url that exports your content as a zip archive.
I don't know anything about Svbtle, but ultimately that isn't a promise anyone can realistically make regardless of the best intentions. You need money to run servers. What happens when a company runs out of it or even ceases to exist? What if there's accidental unrecoverable data loss due to a bug or outage? What if the operator gets hit by a bus?
If you have data you care about, hold it yourself (and back it up). Trusting a random free online service with the sole copy of everything is foolish.
> We promise to do everything in our power to ensure that any content you publish on the platform will continue to be available on the web forever, at the same permanent link, as long as you want it there. This promise even applies after you stop your subscription to the service. (For more details see the small print below.)
But, there's a lesson here. Nothing is a replacement for backups and you'll care more about your own stuff than anyone else will.