End of Free Ning - What To Do?

[Allan Mertner]

I have just seen the news that Ning is in trouble, have laid off 40% of staff, and will end Free Ning sites (such as this one) in 2 months time, early July 2010.

The cheapest option for retaining this site is $20/year - and it will probably be fine. That option has a maximum of 150 members, and we today have 116 here at vpascal, without large growth prospects.

Do you know of an alternative that it's easy to port to? Do you care if vpascal.ning.com disappears? Or would you like it to stay up? Plesae reply with a comment and I'll think about what to do...

Cheers,
Allan

[Robert AH Prins]

It would be sad if the site disappeared, but if you were to set up a PayPal account for support, and each of us would contribute just $1.00, we'd be safe for the next five years. I don't know if there is an alternative, unless you would like to resurrect vpascal.com, or maybe move to sites.google.com or groups.google.com for a simple mailing list, not as nice, but it would be OK for me.

[Marco van de Voort]

Given the current activity it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money on it. Some maillist at yahoo or maybe google would be fine. Several delphi groups that I track (like indy, dxgettext) , use yahoo groups and that works fine. (years of hassle free operation)

[Marco van de Voort]

(the new deadline is August 20)

[Allan Mertner]

I just paid $20 for a year. Cheaper than rying to find a new home for the site.

I'll consider the question again next year :)

[richard jasmin]

Dreamhost is relatively affordable and offers unlimited bandwidth and space for ~$10 a month. They bill in yearly and 6 month cycles, but its EZ to get going, even with Drupal/WP or similar site.BEST BET I have seen yet and they support SVN/CVS if you want.

Only reason rjasmin.net is down is b/c I couldnt afford the server fees at yearly billing rates. site should be in the wayback machine if you look.

[Phil Simmons]

I agree I would not mind contributing a dollar to help keep the site alive - $20 /116 is a small contribution

[Allan Mertner]

For now, don't worry about it - I'll pay the $20 per year for a while longer.  It's more work to figure out how to deal with it than it is worth to just pay it :)

[Tony Pascale]

Do Wordpress with bbpres forums and buddypress for the profiles.