Pogoplug

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

~ the obit ~

Daniel Putterman started Cloud Engines in San Francisco in 2007 and raised two million dollars in seed money from a list that included Sabeer Bhatia, who had built Hotmail, and Ron Conway. The product shipped in 2009 and the pitch fit in a sentence: plug a USB hard drive into this box and plug the box into your router, and the drive becomes reachable from anywhere on the internet without you renting storage from anybody.

That was a genuinely good answer to 2009. Dropbox existed but was small and expensive per gigabyte. Most people had a external drive sitting on a desk with everything on it, unreachable the moment they left the house. Pogoplug cost $129 by the time it was properly in retail, it was a one-time purchase, and the storage was whatever drive you already owned. Foundry Group put seven million dollars into the company on the strength of it.

This is an American product and I never bought one, but the category is one I understand from the other side, because the Turkish version of this problem in 2009 was solved by leaving a machine switched on at home and dealing with a dynamic IP address. The Pogoplug promise was that a stranger's server would handle the addressing for you and stay out of everything else. It held that shape for about two years before Cloud Engines started selling storage itself, which is where the trouble is.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fire hazard ~

On 2 August 2011 the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced recall number 11-294, covering about 9,500 Pogoplug Video units in the United States and 1,500 in Canada, priced around $200 and made in China. Cloud Engines had reported three incidents to the commission. One device caught fire. One emitted smoke. One melted and damaged the desk it was standing on.

Owners were told to unplug the device immediately and contact the company for a refund or a replacement. Cloud Engines discontinued the Video model, and service to the remaining Video units ended on 9 August 2011, a week after the recall notice went out. The company survived it. The product line went on for another five years.

~ eight days ~

Somewhere along the way Cloud Engines added Pogoplug Cloud, a subscription tier with unlimited online storage, which reversed the original proposition entirely. The files were no longer in your house. They were on Cloud Engines' machines, and Cloud Engines was paying for the disks.

The blog post went up on 20 September 2016. Pogoplug Cloud would cease operation at 9am on 28 September. Customers could still log in after that, but the data would not be there, because it was to be securely and permanently destroyed immediately after the shutdown. Eight days is not enough time to pull an unlimited amount of anything down a home connection, which is the arithmetic problem sitting underneath the announcement. The company offered the Pogoplug Remote Access software free as a consolation and suggested Backblaze or Carbonite for people who wanted their backups somewhere else.

~ what took the name ~

Pogoplug the device business outlived Pogoplug the cloud by a while. The Internet Archive has pogoplug.com serving a real page titled "Pogoplug Remote Access Software" as late as September 2018, still offering a free trial. After that the captures thin out and change character.

By May 2021 the domain was hosting an Indonesian online gambling site. By 2026 both pogoplug.com and cloudengines.com resolve to the same thing, a default Google Cloud Run welcome page reading "Congratulations", which is what you get when somebody deploys nothing to a container and points a name at it. A liveness check that only reads status codes would call all of that alive, and the company behind it has been listed as closed for years.

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