End of Glitch hosting
Just got the email about Glitch ending web hosting so I thought I’d try and break the blogging slump with a few reflections.
It’s a sad thing! It’s pretty well documented that I love Glitch and use it a lot. This site/service/community was a Good Thing in my life that made me feel Nice Feelings. It was also a major source of inspiration. Talk about environments that raise aspirations… somehow the playfulness and flexibility of Glitch just caused creative excitement to spark into being. There is nothing quite like it in that respect.
At my most burnt out and depressed from work, I emailed Anil to try and blag a job, and while they didn’t have a job for me, Jenn did send me a shirt and sticker pack, and they grandfathered me into complimentary Boosted hosting, which was a very generous move.
Big sympathy to the whole Glitch team, leadership, #hugops and all of it. I think there was no villain here, as Glitch was running out of runway to start with, pre-acquisition by Fastly… they also couldn’t make it work profitably, and… there you go.
I can handle migrating a load of static sites; I’ll just make them subsites of stegriff co uk.
Ah, except the sites I have which are powered by the Glitch API. I suppose I’ll need to download some final JSON responses before that goes down brb… ok, done (wowow I have 120 Glitch projects… ok)
The Node hosting I’m not so sure about. I don’t want to spin up a server or a droplet or a PaaS or whatever and I’m still container-skeptic. So while I get that there are choices ranging from DigitalOcean to Azure to Fly.io to OVH/Hostinger/Ionos, I don’t really know which one is for me.
Just looking at my home-made timeline of Glitch projects is very nostalgic. I’ll have to go through this blog and amend a lot of links! 😅
It just occurred to me to ask what is going to happen to Glitch CDN assets 😬
This whole thing made me remember how we’re exposed to closure of cloud services, whether free or paid-for.
Thinking about what would happen if my MS, GitHub, or Netlify account got shut or locked… shudder.
Well, thanks Glitch for the memories, the inspiration, the connections, and all of it. One day I’d love to see something as powerful and inspiring as Glitch again. Some words to end with, which have featured in my Glitch bio for 5+ years, “Make Cool Stuff Together!” 🎏