By the time you are reading this, searchcode.com’s DNS should have been updated to point at a placeholder index.html file I created.
In short I am shutting down the current iteration of searchcode.com, unless something drastic happens in the next week.
The reasons for this… are few, but worth exploring.
While I have often described searchcode as a fun forever project, big enough to be interesting, but small enough to be done by one person, I probably should have clarified that this was true so long as one or two of the following things held true,
- It was inexpensive to run
- It was able to cover its own costs
The first has not been true for a while now. The large index size 6.4 TB at last count, the RAM requirement of 100 GB and the number of CPU cores needed to use that RAM meant it needed a fairly decent server to run on. I had been running it via Hetzner (who a great BTW) to get the maximum value for money. Which was fine up until point number two.
The falling value of the Australian dollar. Hetzner bills in Euros, which is especially painful to me right now. Coupled with the bottom falling out of the Ad market, and rise of LLM’s and zero click info meaning no click-thru’s has resulted in an approximate 10x drop in advertising revenue.
So I did consider some options here. The first was to downgrade to a smaller server. However, this would only stem the bleeding, and frankly just forestalling the inevitable.
Another option was buy my own server, and co-lo. However co-lo prices in Australia are fairly expensive, especially when it comes to bandwidth, plus I now have some other piece of hardware I have to maintain.
Last thing I considered as buying a decent home desktop, filling it with 192 GB of RAM and a large HDD and running it from home. I have a fairly decent FTTP home connection, battery and solar so it wouldn’t be that bad… but again, if I do this I would want to use my desktop for other things.
So that covers the main reason for shutting it down. Note I was never about starting up, cashing in, selling out and bro’ing down. I just wanted it to cover costs so I could keep working on it. I am however unwilling to keep throwing… decent sums of money towards something that while it does get me speaking gigs and the like is still a hole in my pocket.
So what else could I have done?
Find alternative revenue sources. While the searchcode.com API is very popular with a lot of people scanning for things, its not exactly something they are willing to pay for. I have tried.
If you are using the API and really need it, contact me in the next week and we can work something out. Otherwise prepare for it to be gone soon.
I think that frankly, large scale code search, while useful is not something anyone is willing to pay for, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering how black duck kill koders.com a while ago.
Anyway.
As much as I would like to have a heap of companies contact me all of sudden telling me that searchcode.com underpinned their product and all of sudden they really need it and want to pay to assist, I don’t think it likely.
Where to from here? As mentioned I am rebooting searchcode. What I mean by this, is that similar to a comic book reboot I am going to re-imagine the idea of it, and look at other ways to bring it to life. I was previously working on this with a project I called “searchcode master” but I may just reconsider it the new searchcode. More to come on that later as I get closer to a release for it, one with a clear strategy to covering costs to avoid this sort of situation in the future.
With that off my chest, im going to go enjoy a bottle of red wine and a movie.