Just recently (i.e., last week) I have changed the research location where I work in order to pursue a PhD. From conservation and animal genetics (the focus of my previous research center) to tropical diseases (where I am now - and I confess - motivates me much more).
The first thing that I have published during my MSc was a small web service to download, organize and visualize complete mitochondrial genomes from multiple species. The web service requires some server (obviously). Its purpose is completely out of the scope of what my new place does. Also, there is nobody capable of maintaining the application running on previous place. For now it is working, but I don’t know for how long. I suppose that after the first power failure there the machine will simply not be rebooted back.
There is this obvious, immediate, question of maintenance of services that have one person (or a very small team) behind coupled with a lab which really has no professional infrastructure available. I would guess that my application was not the first, and won’t be the last to disappear because of a fragile infrastructure (human, technical or other).
After that service going public it occurred to me the fragility of the whole situation, so I took measures to avoid it happening again: My subsequent developments were all client side applications (Java Web Start to make it easy on users) and I bought my own Internet domain (I already had server space so it was not that expensive) to host the applications.
My fundamental point here is not to propose my solution (which is surely not feasible in some scenarios - many server side apps have to be server side) but to draw attention to a problem which you might have in the future, a problem that will affect the longevity and usefulness of your work.
PS - BTW, If you would happen to have the ability to host a not computationally intensive BioPerl application (This one), I would really be thankful.
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[…] from entrez databases, and I assume would be quite useful to animal geneticists and ecologists. Tiago is physically moving institutes and his blog posts talks of his fears of how the app might die if his personal computer goes […]