Changes over at Pingoat
Some readers may be using Pingoat as their main ping service. Changes are afloat at Pingoat that you should be aware of. First, pingoat was sold. Second, the new owners plan some changes. According to their blog the changes will be the following:
1. We will have to stop all the free offsite API usage of the pingoat.com service.
2. We will keep the free onsite service of course. The pinging service will always be free at the website itself.
3. We will create a paid membership for the offline use of our service. This membership will have other services and bonuses. These will be announced later.
4. More than likely we will create an affiliate program where the members can actually make money.
I am not quite sure how to interpret #1. Does that mean if I automatically ping their RPC server from within my bloggin app that this won’t be allowed anymore unless I pay? I am interpreting it this way since the second sentence of point 2 states that “the pinging service will always be free AT THE WEBSITE ITSELF.” (emphasis mine)
Earlier this year I had switched to pingoat from pingomatic because the latter was suffering from hardware/overload issues. But alas, it looks like I will be switching back, not only because of the news above, but because of changes over at Pingomatic (which is the subject of my next post!)
Posted by Paul Flyer on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 in RSS Solutions
Tim Phelan Says:
May 22nd, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Hi Paul
Just to update you on what is going on at Pingoat. We have ended the RPC service as we stated, although we did it almost 2 months after your post. We waited as long as we could but finally we really didn’t have any choice. Well actually, we could have gone down the road that pingomatic has, which is to keep adding servers as the service grows and each server gets overwhelmed and shuts down. You probably have noticed the recent pingomatic problems.
As pingomatic had their problems recently it caused traffic to swell dramatically on pingoat and then we finally decided it was time to stop the offsite service.
We probably won’t be starting a paid service for a while, if ever. We may bring back the RPC in some form in the future.
But for now we offer a better online service than pingomatic.
1. More sites to ping to. Twice as many.
2. Faster.
3. More reliable onsite service. After this change we should not have any problems with server overload.
Of course, if we can find a sponsor to pay for 2,3 or 4 more servers as pingomatic does, then the RPC may come back very quickly. Anybody out there interested?
It really is simple to use Pingoat from the site, and since it’s quicker and pings more sites, why not use it?
Regards,
Tim Phelan