Is Free Software Daily dead? UPDATE: they are back!

I am a regular user of the social news site Free Software Daily, and unfortunately the site seems to be off the net for more than a day now. For those who don't know it, Free Software Daily is the equivalent of Digg, but only for topics related to open source.

The site seems to have disappeared Wednesday, and as of today Free Software Daily was not back up. I first hoped that it was just a local connection problem but downforeveryoneorjustme.com squashed that hope: Free Software Daily is off the net. Now this could very well be a minor technical issue, however following my experience in IT I can tell you this: if you can't bring your system back after one day, then it smells very bad! I don't know what happened but it is very rare to see an active site just vanish of the web. Usually hosting providers have redundant infrastructures, so I would be more inclined to believe in some sort of database corruption. I just hope that they have a backup of the site and that they will be able to be back online soon.

In any case I do hope that this is not the end of Free Software Daily. It is not that the site sent a lot of traffic my way (although any targeted traffic is good no matter how small) but rater that the site was rather slick, and aesthetically pleasing. The community was obviously much smaller than on sites like slashdot or lxer, but the more limited amount of information was easily digestible for newcomers to open source. The site also featured a beginner section that was a precious addition to the Linux blogosphere. It was an ideal place to promote articles of my beginner blog "from Windows to Linux for the average Joe".

If someone notices that the site is back online or knows what actually happened please post a comment so that we can all know what is Free Software Daily 's fate.

UPDATE: Yay, this friday Free Software daily is back up! Here is the explanation for the shutdown: The cause of our absence was to do with our previous hosting company, 3FN , being shut down by the FTC.

You can get more details Here