I was a bit sad today when I opened my email to see a message from Dan Cody announcing that freedom2operate (f2o) will be shutting down in the next few weeks due to the time and cost of maintaining the service and the abuse of some of the free accounts.
I don’t know if anyone remembers, but I was the summer intern at f2o in 2004, which gave me my first opportunity to work with real servers being used by real people, where a mistake on my part could end up denying service to 2000+ customers (at that time I think some paid accounts were on the same server as the free ones). I can’t remember exactly how I got the job, but I seem to recall applying late after encouragement from someone else and I must have said the right things when Dan interviewed me. It was a fantastic learning experience, looks great on my CV and was good fun to boot.
As well as the internship, f2o gave me the opportunity to play around with PHP on a proper server (instead of just running things on my local machine) without having to fork out for commercial hosting, which was rather expensive at the time. I guess all good things come to an end eventually though, and given the costs of running f2o I’m actually surprised that the free accounts service lasted as long as it did.