Last July, Soomal (also known as Shumao or Digital Duo), which had been operating for 15 years, finally couldn’t sustain itself and began focusing on new media platforms. Upon hearing this news, I felt a void in my heart, as this was a website that had accompanied me since my university days. Fortunately, two days ago, I saw that Dan Zong had finally packaged and uploaded the website mirror, so I downloaded and deployed the mirror site Soomal.cc.
About Soomal’s Shutdown
In short, Soomal started just like this site, as a simple personal blog. But in the early days of the internet, personal blogs were still a novelty, easily gathering like-minded people. Thus, upon the suggestion of netizens, Soomal began to specialize in audio equipment reviews. With the rise of smartphones, it further shifted its focus to mobile audio, photography, and other aspects. To date, it has accumulated tens of thousands of review reports, witnessing the rise of domestic devices step by step.
In recent years, due to the rapid advancement of mobile internet, traditional website traffic has gradually declined. Consequently, Soomal began transitioning to new media platforms, including WeChat public accounts and short video platforms.
However, I always felt that retaining the website format does not conflict with transitioning to new media. I have discussed this multiple times in WeChat groups. The main conflict lies in the outdated architecture of Soomal’s original website, making updates cumbersome. Additionally, as the website grew larger, the costs increased significantly, while traffic and revenue were hard to come by. Thus, after much deliberation, the decision was made to shut it down, which is undoubtedly a pity.
About the Soomal.cc Mirror Site
Originally, I wanted to create a Soomal mirror site using entirely free solutions. However, considering the stability of free domains, I registered the domain soomal.cc, paying for 10 years upfront. Normally, it should remain accessible until 2035.
For the server, I am currently using Oracle’s free tier server with 1 CPU and 1GB of RAM, which offers 10TB of traffic per month by default. Additionally, I have enabled Cloudflare’s free CDN for protection. Since it’s a static website, the server load is minimal.
It’s worth noting that the original Soomal mirror was 64GB, while Oracle’s free tier server only allocates 50GB of space by default. Therefore, after downloading the mirror, I converted all images on the site to webp format. After conversion, the total site size was reduced to 30GB, just enough to run on the Oracle server.
About Future Maintenance
Currently, the Soomal.cc mirror is up and running smoothly. I am also considering new solutions to ensure the mirror can operate stably for over 10 years.
Change the original website architecture to Hugo to further optimize the site’s space. This is mainly because the original architecture is too outdated, and many functions like text search cannot be implemented.
Separate the website content from images, uploading the content to Github and the images to Cloudflare or other free image hosting services abroad.
However, due to the large number of website files, this may take a considerable amount of time to complete. For example, the process of converting images to webp format alone took me two days.