(mis)use of technology

As you may have noticed, all my websites (except this blog) are offline… thanks to the fact that both the free hosting providers I was using have stopped providing free hosting. Really.. it isn’t a big problem for me any more. I am thinking of integrating the pages of my website munim.be in this blog and forget about the other sites. But I am not going to talk about that.. I am going to talk about why StoneRocket and Xeeblo have stopped free hosting.

You see.. this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Infact, it has happened THREE times. I make a nice website and upload it… and then after a few months, the host decides to stop free hosting. They say that they couldn’t financially support the servers. Unfortunately for them, the idea of their members visiting their forums regularly and clicking the PPC ads(read google adsense) didn’t quite work out as expected. That was their only source of income. They didn’t force any ads on their members websites. Its kinda sad really… the members who really used the hosting services provided were the ones who hardly participated in the forums(in most cases, if not all) and they were the ones who the first to complain if anything wrong happened.

But in the case of Xeeblo, something else happened. They weren’t short of money.. It seems many users had violated the Terms of Usage and had used their server space illegally. Infact, Xeeblo’s had recieved complaints from their server hosting provider about this. Xeeblo sent mails to their users and posted messages in the forum which of course didn’t help.. and finally they had to back down and stop free hosting. Someone is kind enough to give quality free hosting and people misuse it.. sad.

Something else happened in the case of Stonerocket. First of all, it started out with server overload which slowed down things a bit. A couple of members who never visit the forums start complaining loudly. The admins solved the problems in most of the cases.. and even decided to get a new server. Then their server was attacked which halted hosting for a few days. After hosting for restored, the admins quickly shifted paid accounts and moderator accounts to a different server. Things improved a lot.. but that didn’t stop the complaints and abuses. Some idiots actually wrote emails to the admin ranting about the hosting.. when nothing was wrong. I was one of the staff members in the forum and admin had posted a very touching message.. He was spending cash and time to provide free hosting to the members and all they could do was just complain. Finally he decided to put an end to it by stopping free hosting. Stonerocket still provides paid hosting and has a couple of projects at hand.

My point is why do people misuse something which is otherwise a great service or product? Even email: it started out as a great idea… but thanks to SPAMMERS, about half of the mail most people get is just unwanted junk.
Internet: Great powerful tool… but now you have problems like phishing, sites with fake information, pornography, scams.. not to mention the fact that most viruses spread through the internet. Now, an internet connection is actually considered as a threat or a liability in a network or an organisation, when it should be considered as a resource. Now internet is maybe the biggest problem to movie studios, musicians, software firms, etc.. thanks to rampant piracy.
Even search engines: Started out as a tool to search and find websites.. but it got somehow confused with advertising and SEO scams.
The list is endless.. networks, SMS, bluetooth, wifi, and even blogs.
It seems the next release of Windows (vista) will mainly concentrate on security of the computer agaisnt viruses, hackers, worms, etc. I mean.. just compare the speed of a computer with antivirus, antispyware, firewall.. the lot, with a computer with no such tools. If there were no such threats, all this computing power could be put to more productive use like better user interface, faster applications, more applications running together and so on.
Just imagine what it would have been like if no one would have thought of misusing anything. A world without spam, system clogging antivirus software.. Think about it.