Social network Hi5 has cut 28 jobs after completing a migration from open source servers to ones based on Microsoft’s .Net software. The move was part of a larger plan to shift the social network toward social gaming and commerce.
Alex St. John, president of San Francisco-based Hi5, confirmed a report that the company had cut the jobs after it moved its site off of what he called a “tremendously burdensome” Linux/Postgres base to a Microsoft-based Windows Server OS infrastructure. The company made the move in order to lower costs and improve flexibility for the social network, which as been refocused on social games since St. John joined in late 2009.
The affected employees were mainly people who maintained the old site while operations team migrated to the new servers.
“The technical problem was that Hi5.com had seen a lot of engineering over the years and the site had gotten entangled such that updating our servers and databases to newer theoretically more secure versions had become a big deal because nobody knew how the site depended on bugs in older builds of Linux and Postgres,” St. John said. “Untangling the site from dependence on specific OS and database versions was a necessary chore to achieve better stability and security.”
With that task out of the way, not as many people are needed. Meanwhile, St. John said Hi5’s engineering team will now focus on building a new site focused on a social gaming platform, using the .Net framework and moving away from open source and Java technology. St. John said the transition went remarkably smoothly.
The hard part was consolidating data centers and databases (a 12 to 1 reduction) while running a live site. Now the new site needs different kinds of people to maintain it. St. John, a former Microsoft evangelist and a Microsoft customer while at his prior startup WildTangent, said the move toward Windows was needed because of the new focus on a commerce-centric business. But unraveling the dependencies between the old and the new was the hard part. After the migration, the site was more stable and faster.
“If there were any interesting insights to be gained in the Open vs Closed religious debate,” he said. “It’s that it is clearly more resource intensive (expensive) for a commercial company to use open source platforms because they have to have their own internal teams evaluating the security of everything they use and the internal ability to fix critical bugs or review patches from the community.”
The tough part is that the competent employees essentially engineered themselves out of a job. St. John said he appreciated their efforts. Hi5 raised $14 million in funding last year.