Today I am very excited to announce that Cligs has been acquired by Mister Wong! Cligs lives and from now on will continue to grow under the management of an established company with a history of building great Web 2.0 companies.

When I announced that Cligs was to shut down, I was contacted by several parties interested in taking over the service. I’d like to thank all of these people who were all very supportive of the service and wanted to keep Cligs running. I’d like to also thank all the users who contacted me privately and publicly to show their support and appreciation of Cligs.

I only considered serious buyers who would obviously take good care of Cligs’ existing users. For that, Mister Wong is a great choice and a large part of why they won out. Kai Tietjen, founder of Mister Wong, summarized their motivation by saying that, "Cligs is a complete service with a unique set of tools and a solid user base. Competition is healthy for the market and it would be a real shame to see such a useful service disappear. We are happy to add Cligs to our existing portfolio of Web 2.0 services and we look forward to welcoming all its users to the Wong family."

The hand-over work is already in progress and close to completion. Of course, I will continue working with the team at Mister Wong to ensure everything is running smoothly and correctly. We do not expect any interruptions during the hand-over, but please do let us know if you encounter anything out of the ordinary.

I’d like to close on a personal note as this is likely to be my very last post on this blog.

Firstly, thank you to each and every user of Cligs. Over a year ago when I launched Cligs, I never thought it would grow to be so big so fast. Your feedback and support helped grow Cligs to what it is today and now you get to help Mister Wong build the service you want.

Secondly, of course I’ll be working on other web apps. To keep updated or get in touch, below are my contact details:

• On Twitter: @pierrefar
• My LinkedIn profile (Please mention you knew me via Cligs.)
• My personal blog: Things of Sorts (I’ll start blogging more now that I have some more time )
• Email: cligs (at) pierrefar (dot) com

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that Cligs has been acquired!

The full details will go live on this blog at 8pm UK.

Several people have contacted me in the past few days about acquiring Cligs. Some of these offers are serious and interesting to investigate further.

As the process will take some time to sort out the details, the shutdown plan is officially on hold pending a sale. If a deal is not reached in a reasonable time, the shutdown will be done later.

Sorry for being quiet this week. It’s been crazy busy replying to all the emails of people reaching out and offering help, bouncing ideas around, etc.

A pattern of questions has emerged from people thinking of buying the Cligs service. So to stop repeating myself, here is a list of the common questions and their answers.

• How much for? The best offer wins. Email pierre@cli.gs by 14 October 2009 (in one week) and I’ll get in touch with everyone from the 15-21 October. The best/winning offer is not necessarily the one offering the most money.
• No, I won’t name a price.
• No, I won’t sell just the domain name.
• How many users does Cligs have? Tens of thousands registered user accounts, with countless others using it without an account. The exact number of accounts can be disclosed to those genuinely interested.
• How many forwards does Cligs do in a month? Tens of millions. Again, the exact number can be disclosed to those genuinely interested.
• How much revenue does Cligs earn? Consider it zero.
• Cligs is written in PHP using a custom framework, uses memcached, is hosted on just one High-CPU medium EC2 instance (yes one), and uses Amazon’s SimpleDB for persistent storage. It uses a few helper PHP libraries.
• The system is set up such that you can set up a number of EC2 instances behind a load balancer and it should scale. I’ve actually run the service briefly with two instances and it worked.
• How much does it cost to run Cligs? A few hundred dollars a month. It varies by traffic volume given how Amazon charges for bandwidth and SimpleDB usage.
• I’m happy to offer advice/help after the sale if you wish; we can talk about the details.
• No I won’t open source the code at this stage. Sorry.

For any questions or clarifications, please email me: pierre@cli.gs.

I’d like to thank everyone who wrote publicly and privately in support of the service. The kind words you have all expressed are very much appreciated and tell me that all the hard work was well-received. Seriously, thank you!

Since the announcement a few hours ago, a lot of questions popped up. I think the list below covers them all; if not please write a comment below and I’ll answer you directly. Alternatively, my email is pierre AT cli.gs.

• Am I willing to sell the service? Of course! As I said to everyone who’s asked that, I’m very open to any idea that keeps the service running. On top of that, I’m can also guarantee some time after the sale to help transition to the new owners and to advise them about how the service works (technically) and about the market. The point here is that I cannot continue to be the only one running the service.
• A related question that needs answering: Cligs is written in PHP hosted on EC2 and SimpleDB.
• How will the analytics data export work? As it stands in the internal beta, it works by exporting each clig’s details into a tab-separated file (a TSV file). TSV files are supported across all platforms and so ensure you will be able to access your data no matter what.
• What will happen to the user accounts after shutdown? They will remain functional at least till the end of November, and probably for longer to ensure everyone has a chance to download their analytics.
• Update 1: What about 301Works? As a founding member of 301works, of course it’s something I know about and thinking how to best use it in this instance.

It is with great sadness that I have to shut down Cligs. On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics.

The forwarding data will be retained so that forwarding can continue for at least till the end of November; after that, there are no guarantees as to how long the service will continue to forward the short URLs to their destinations.

Shortly (in a few days), I’ll be deploying a mechanism to export your data. It is almost done and just needs a bit more testing before I’m comfortable releasing it.

Why Now?

There isn’t a short answer to this as there are lots of interacting factors. Here is what I can tell you:

• Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own. This assertion is fact in my mind given what I’m seeing in the market and what my customers and users are saying. There comes a point when you need to actually hear the message the market is telling you, and not just listen and ignore it. This is the core reason.
• Cligs is a big service (for some definition of big). It has tens of thousands of registered user accounts, and does tens of millions of forwards a month. Not bad for a one man show doing this on the side. However, a service this size requires customer support, which is time. It’s not much time in absolute terms (an hour a day usually), but again, for me, it’s a context switch I can do without.
• I have a nice plan for how to add premium features on top of offering short URLs. When I look at that plan as a business, it’s quite separate from a short URL play. Building on what I have now, and integrating the two might work but will require a lot of effort (i.e. time) that I cannot afford to give. This is the other major reason.
• Finally, it all costs some money. It’s a bit of money out of pocket every month. By necessity, the Cligs architecture is extremely efficient for what it does.

Any questions or feedback in the comments below, or contact me privately.

Update: I worked through the problem with my host and we hashed together some ideas on how to best fix it. The fix was deployed into testing this morning (the weekend is a low traffic time) and went live about an hour ago. It seems to be working perfectly.

The problem was this: Cligs was hitting the database too much, and that was locking up the database intermittently. The lock-ups were due to some recent changes that made Cligs faster, but the unintended downside was that the database was getting overloaded. The fix therefore is to find a middle ground to maintain the speed improvements yet keep the database happy. Which is exactly what I did.

Let me know if you find anything amiss. Thanks!

Original Post’s Text

The database that maps cligs to usernames, i.e. keeps track of who owns which clig, is experiencing problems. I’ve put in a support request with the Cligs hosting provider and investigating.

The issue as far as I can tell is that you can create short URLs (i.e. write to the database) but not read them. The resulting error message in Cligs is that it think you do not have any short URLs in your account.

So in short: don’t worry, your cligs are safe, and haven’t vanished. I’ll be working to fix this asap.

A few users are reporting an "infinite login loop": You sign in, Cligs confirms that you’ve signed in successfully, and then when you browse to another page, it asks you to login again.

This is a browser caching issue and I’m trying to figure out how to side-step it. The fix in the meantime is very simple: simply refresh the page.

More details and a permanent fix soon.

A friend suggested this a few days ago, and frankly, it makes so much sense that I’m kicking myself for not doing it on my own.

As of just now, the My Cligs displays little flags for each geotargeting rule the clig has. The screenshot below shows what that looks like for one of my test cligs:

Each flag is a link to the geotargeted destination, so hovering over each flag or clicking on it will tell you the destination for visitors from that country. If there aren’t any geotargeting rules, nothing is shown.

As ever, feedback most welcome.

Saturday’s speed up had a little bug in it: if you edit a clig or delete it, Cligs will not show you that the clig has been edited or deleted when in reality the changes were successfully done.

I’ve fixed that now, and to help you check, I’ve added a refresh link on the My Cligs page, right above the hits table (screenshot below). Click on that and Cligs will reload the detail of your cligs from scratch and you will see the changes.