MyDeathSpace.com

MyDeathSpace.com is a website devoted to connecting the deaths of social media website account-holders to their news obituaries. It is notable due to media attention that it garnered over the practice of seeking out dead MySpace users such as Taylor Behl and Anna Svidersky.

It launched in January 2006, but did not receive national attention until March 2006. The site was started by Mike Patterson from San Francisco, California.

Status

Due to its rapid growth and popularity, MyDeathSpace has had problems with availability. It was down for two weeks in November 2006 presenting viewers with the message "This IP address cannot be used for browsing." In December 2006, MyDeathSpace returned with the following explanation on the website:

"Wow, now that was quite an outage! But what and why did it happen? Well, to put it in plain English, we outgrew our previous host. We received no warnings from them; they simply shut our site down and sent us an email telling us how we've exceeded the capabilities of our hosting plan. However, they were kind enough to offer us an upgrade for a mere $250 a month EXTRA. We declined. Since we were caught off guard, we had to scurry to find a host that could handle us and our users. We were in negotiations with one hosting company for about a week, but at the last minute those plans fell through (expensive licensing issues). We attempted to use another host (which is why you saw the "coming soon" page for a few days). This also fell through because; well... they just plain suck. We're hoping this will remain MyDeathSpace.com's new home for a while. Happy surfing..."

On July 30, 2007, the site was refusing web traffic, perhaps due to a surge in popularity following a profile on CNN's website. Since then, the site's popularity has declined dramatically.

The webmasters later posted a picture of the article on CNN.com and gave the following explanation:

"The Associated Press has written an article about MyDeathSpace.com, which has been picked up by ALL news sources effectively taking down MyDeathSpace.com. The traffic is causing the box to become completely unresponsive. Please stay tuned into this page for updates!!!"

As of August 12, 2007, the site is back online.

During 2011 the site again went down due to a reported "catastrophic hard-drive failure". The site has since come back online and is online as of May 23, 2013.

References

    This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/12/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.