Parodius Networking

» see parodius.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I used sites that lived on Parodius without ever learning the name of the host. That is what a host is for. You followed a link to someone's page about the NES picture processing unit or someone else's archive of Japanese arcade flyers, you read it, you left, and the part of the address before the first dot was the only thing you ever typed. The part after it was infrastructure, and infrastructure is invisible until it goes.

Parodius Networking was one machine in a rented rack, run by Jeremy Chadwick, who posted as jdc. It gave free accounts to people building nonprofit sites about classic video gaming: emulator authors, romhackers, console documentation projects, chiptune people. The front page had a line on it that explained the whole operating philosophy in eleven words: "No unsolicited advertisments, no banners, no spam; just like it was in 1991..." The typo was in the original and stayed there for years.

On 21 April 2012 at 02:05 a post went up titled "All good things...". It opened: "After nearly 18 years of providing hosting/services to folks who are involved with emulation, general 'electronica', or other similar subcultures/underground, we have decided to close our doors." The date it named was 31 August 2012, "the final/last day of our co-location contract with our co-location provider". Most of the dismantling would happen on the weekend of the 28th and 29th, which the post christened TFD, The Final Days.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was on it ~

The Archive Team inventory of what was hosted there reads like a map of a particular corner of the web. There was nesdev, the reference documentation that an entire generation of homebrew NES programmers learned from, and nesworld beside it. There was blargg's Game Music Emu, the library that made chiptune playback work in things that are still shipping. There was transcorp, a romhacking site, and sdlmame, and rocknes, and the FFXI quest database, and a dozen personal pages with no name beyond a tilde and a username.

Some of it moved. nesdev went to its own domain, blargg's work went to a personal site, sdlmame and transcorp both found new homes, and jdc's own pages moved to koitsu.org. The ones the inventory marks "Closed as of" are the ones that simply did not come back. Three went on 9 August, four more on the 14th, three on the 21st, the last two on the 29th. The deaths are staggered across three weeks because each site had its own owner and its own willingness to go find a new box.

~ the way it closed ~

The shutdown post is nine screens of frequently asked questions and it is the most considerate exit document I have read from any dead service. Users could move data over FTP, SFTP, scp or rsync, and if a service was not enabled on an account it would be switched on for them. URL redirections from any parodius.com address to wherever the site had moved would stay in place until 31 October. Email forwarding for every parodius.com address, the same.

If you did not have the bandwidth to download your own site, he offered to mail you a USB flash drive with it, as many as it took, and wrote "The cost of the drive is on us; you'll pay nothing." If you had a domain registered under his name he would approve a transfer to you, "no questions asked", with the phrase in bold. Any email left on the server after the final days would be deleted, all hard disks would be zeroed, all personal information shredded or wiped, and if you wanted a backup held as insurance he would keep one until 31 December 2012.

Compare that to the modern shape of a hosting death, which is a notice at thirty days and a billing page that stops answering.

~ what it meant from here ~

Turkey in 2012 had broadband, cheap VPSes and no particular reason to care that an American hobbyist host was switching off. But the dial-up years taught a specific anxiety that this closure belongs to: your stuff lives on somebody else's computer, and you do not know that person, and if they stop paying for the rack your six years of writing stop existing. We all learned that lesson from Geocities instead, which handled it far worse.

Parodius is the counterexample nobody cites, because it was small and because the people it served were technical enough to move. Roughly two dozen sites, one admin, eighteen years, and a three-week wind-down in which the stated goal was that nothing should be lost. Most of it was not.

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