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.