5
horus
1y

More then ten years ago, as a student, I made a website as freelance job. Customer was a friend of my father, old, artist, digital illiterate af. Money was okay when I had none but as you can imagine not much actually.
Guy has no idea about domains, hosting etc. So to keep things simple I hosted the site on my webspace (which i needed anyway back than), I made it with Wordpress because it looked that he wants to add content from time to time.
He never did and surely forgot about the possibility.
I still host the site, although it's the only thing on the webspace meanwhile. When it goes down, guy calls me, so he actually is aware of his site. I don't mind the 1.5€ a month much, but Hoster or fucking Wordpress needs attention from time to time and this is annoying. Updates and stuff. Surely I could turn it into a static site, to minimize the work, but this would take effort too.
I could (and should) charge him, but i am much to expensive nowadays. Just cancel the site? I feel sorry for the guy and that's It's somehow my fault that i didn't inform him properly that a site need maintenance as well. I was not so much of a beginner anymore back than and wonder why i did this mistake, maybe i had just other stuff in my mind (girls most likely) and wanted to finish it asap or I don't know.
So i sit here an update Wordpress once more wondering if my decade old templates will still work.

Comments
  • 3
    Like having a child. One mistake due to lack of experience and you have to support it for the rest of your life...

    Although it might be a good idea to let him know about how things are, justbto be transparent: that you are paying out of your pocket, that you are maintaining it for hours regularly and it takes time, money and effort.

    It's also good to be transparent, because if God forbid you are hit by a car or smth, his website will go down and he [or someone he hires] will not know where to start to bring it up.
  • 2
    @netrikas like a child hahaha xD well.

    I also fear when I tell him I had costs and effort all those years for him and didn't tell him he would feel very bad. But you're right at one point it has to be transparent. Maybe I tell him that there are costs from now on, what is kind of true since i do not need the webspace anymore for sth else.
  • 1
    Rebuild it in static HTML, he won't even know the difference
  • 1
    @ojt-rant sure but it's some efford as well to rebuild it.
  • 3
    Use some tool to crawl and save the website into plain HTML and assets and replace the Wordpress stuff with that static copy.

    Then there shouldn't be any maintenance anymore (if hosting on managed webspace).
  • 1
    @horus I had a similar issue in the past. The website was built in an old Drupal system. It wasn't big but there were so many new bugs and security issues as the years went on. The client had basically no money but it worked out cheaper for me to rebuild the thing in Wordpress than to keep fixing the issues that occurred over time. Sometimes its less stress to take the hit.
  • 1
    @Oktokolo if a good tool for this exist i should do it. I will have a look. Actually i could use it on another project to.
  • 1
    @horus There's wget. It can download every page from sites and every resource they use, so you end up with a static version of the site.
  • 1
    @ethernetzero would it be so simple? I have learned a lot today!
  • 2
    @horus "he would feel very bad" - what's wrong with that? You can follow up with "what's done is done. I did it for you bcz I care about you and you needed that. I hope I'll can turn to you if I'll ever need help with something"

    aaand he's calm bcz he knows he'll get a chance to pay back, and you're ok bcz you have someone in debt for you, should you ever need his help :)

    also, being nice [which you have been all this time] goes a long way. Unless noone knows about it
  • 0
    @horus Good tools for that existed fifteen years ago - but i forgot what i used back then.
  • 3
    @ethernetzero It fucking works. I use wget almost daily but didn't know about the .-r/-m flags. Fucking unbelievable. Awesomeness is awesome.
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