Whoa! , I can hear you say. Yes, it is. This comes to me as big news especially considering that a few other services were recently shut down (ipbfree.com, blogetery.com though it made its way back). For Vox, it looks like the team has tried to make it as painless as possible except for the fact that they are not giving out any information on why they are closing out all of a sudden. Potentially there is more than one reason why Vox is closing shop.
Failed Business Model:
That’s just the sophisticated way of saying that they were not making enough cash to pay their bills. Somehow, I doubt that this is the reason as other similar services like wordpress.com and posterous seem to be flourishing.
Legal Issues:
I wouldn’t rule this one off either. But again, its not very likely. At least in my books, Vox had a very good standing. I don’t look upon it as a place for people to share illegal/copyrighted stuff, especially ones so big to shut down Vox itself.
Considering this, in all likelihood it is probably a business decision. They’re moving over people who had Vox to a free typepad Basic account for now, and I’m sure that they expect a lot of them to start using the Pro accounts. This could work well for them, but considering that the people who are shifting were actually used to a free account for a long time, I get the feeling that they might be a little reluctant to pay, even if it is typePad.
Back on topic, if you were one of the people who had a Vox account, you are not in big trouble. You basically have a bunch of options in front of you and you can choose whichever suits you best.
Migrate to Typepad:
On this page, they’ve provided details on how to migrate to typepad. All your settings, videos, posts, comments will be migrated completely along with the library. Also, once Vox closes on Sep 30, 2010 , your old Vox pages will start redirecting to your typepad page. Once you trigger the migration, you can forget about it and it’ll all be handled on the back end.
Migrate to wordpress/posterous:
Here, there’s no automated way to do this. Get information from this page on how to import your Vox data into WordPress or posterous.
Looking at the options, it seems fairly obvious to me that the best option is to migrate to typepad, especially since they’re providing a free custom domain. If you’re an existing Vox customer, you know about how fragile these services are, and that you shouldn’t have risked building your online home in a sub-domain. Use this opportunity to buy your own domain name and use typepad custom domain feature to make sure you don’t land into this problem again. This is a little more important considering the fact that it looks like Vox will be redirecting your traffic to Typepad but not to WordPress or posterous.
So go ahead. Its time to make your move.
Failed Business Model:
That’s just the sophisticated way of saying that they were not making enough cash to pay their bills. Somehow, I doubt that this is the reason as other similar services like wordpress.com and posterous seem to be flourishing.
Legal Issues:
I wouldn’t rule this one off either. But again, its not very likely. At least in my books, Vox had a very good standing. I don’t look upon it as a place for people to share illegal/copyrighted stuff, especially ones so big to shut down Vox itself.
Considering this, in all likelihood it is probably a business decision. They’re moving over people who had Vox to a free typepad Basic account for now, and I’m sure that they expect a lot of them to start using the Pro accounts. This could work well for them, but considering that the people who are shifting were actually used to a free account for a long time, I get the feeling that they might be a little reluctant to pay, even if it is typePad.
Back on topic, if you were one of the people who had a Vox account, you are not in big trouble. You basically have a bunch of options in front of you and you can choose whichever suits you best.
Migrate to Typepad:
On this page, they’ve provided details on how to migrate to typepad. All your settings, videos, posts, comments will be migrated completely along with the library. Also, once Vox closes on Sep 30, 2010 , your old Vox pages will start redirecting to your typepad page. Once you trigger the migration, you can forget about it and it’ll all be handled on the back end.
Migrate to wordpress/posterous:
Here, there’s no automated way to do this. Get information from this page on how to import your Vox data into WordPress or posterous.
Looking at the options, it seems fairly obvious to me that the best option is to migrate to typepad, especially since they’re providing a free custom domain. If you’re an existing Vox customer, you know about how fragile these services are, and that you shouldn’t have risked building your online home in a sub-domain. Use this opportunity to buy your own domain name and use typepad custom domain feature to make sure you don’t land into this problem again. This is a little more important considering the fact that it looks like Vox will be redirecting your traffic to Typepad but not to WordPress or posterous.
So go ahead. Its time to make your move.
