I haven’t given up, I’ve just stopped trying

I stuck the knife deep into the heart of datapimp.com on Sunday, and killed off my little 8 year old project. 8 years and three months to be exact, but who’s counting. That’s a long time to run an unsuccessful web business. I think we may have set some kind of record.

By unsuccessful I don’t mean it lost money – we usually made money. Just enough to pay for the infrastructure, such as it was. No one who ever worked on it took away a penny.

Aside from myself, over the past eight years the pimp was run and co-owned at various times by Steve Downey, Donald Sumbry, Brad Schuetz and Tom Sepper.

I wrote some shitty things about Steve and Donald over on the now-defunct datapimp blog, and I regret what I said. I did it out of anger and frustration, and while I have been known to write perfectly acceptable shitty things out of frustration and anger, I should know better than to ever aim that anger at my friends, and they were my friends. So for that, I apologize to both of them.

I don’t really know if it has sunk in yet that it is over. Maybe because the hosting service will remain active until the last customer’s account expires some time next year, then the lights go out for good.

I spent most of sunday making the technical changes necessary to take the pimp site offline, then I went out and bought an expensive bottle of 16 year old Lagavulin Scotch and just forgot about it.

datapimp is still a great name, and I will probably use it for something in the future. But not web site hosting. Or blogs. Or free email, or pay email, or anything remotely related to any of those things. It’s enough already.

If you have enough money to spend on advertising you can become a successful web host. I had the notion that a successful web host could be built in other ways. It couldn’t.

Well, I still think it could, but not by one person.

Here comes 2008. What next?