As one with more than his share of deceased personal and side projects, I read David Hamp-Gonsalves post about the long term maintenance costs of personal projects with interest.
Longterm projects are usually incur a small but on going cost. API’s change, PAAS’s deprecate old stacks, frameworks and libraries die / decay and domains need to be renewed.
When the idea is new and shiny, using a fun new platform and API seems cool (and maybe that was the whole point!) and of course it should have its own domain! But over time these things decay and the maintenance bill comes due. And your project dies.
This site is guilty of many of these. It’s hosted on Google App Engine (seemed like a good idea at the time) and I recently had to re-write the web serving part of the application in order to get it running on a new version of App Engine. I’ve also had to migrate the data store due to changes with App Engine. It would probably have been better to use Jekyll (which I haven’t switched to – yet – because I still want the ability to edit in my browser).