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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

The author says that they fired the contractors and closed the site. I can never relate to this. You built something that is at least somewhat useful to at least some people. Why not just keep it online forever? It can't cost more than $5/mo to host this, I have a server where I host around ten of my projects for less than $20/mo.

Why do people shut things down instead of just leaving them there, unmaintained? Even that is better than just taking it offline.

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Well in the case of this particular product that offers medical advice, the info may become outdated fairly quickly. I suspect there is some amount of liability associated with offering potentially out of date medical advice that isn't worth the tiny revenue stream.

Perhaps... Would a disclaimer help there?

It's just a programatic meta analysis. And no one's get sued for having an out of date meta analysis.

It's America - people get sued for far, far less.

Anyone could theoretically get sued for anything. But the chance of getting sued for providing an out of date meta-analysis is indistinguishable from the background chance of getting sued for getting out of bed in the morning. (assuming you're not doing something stupid)

I was tempted to post this same question. I suspect the answer is that the OP just doesn't know how to scale it down; it was built by contractors and he/she might not even have the keys to the boxes, let alone know how to keep them running.

It is unfortunate. Even if the data goes stale and the product is no longer fit for purpose, it shows well and would make a great demonstration for his/her future endeavors. And you never know who might stumble across it in the future and want to revive the technology.

I've had fairly sophisticated sites running on Google App Engine for years after the company was "shut down". One ended up being instrumental as a demo when meeting a later cofounder.

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