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Gofrogs.com
future unknown after going off line As of Friday, gofrogs.com was no more. Steve Fink, director of athletics media relations, said the Internet site dedicated to Horned Frog athletics information will be down indefinitely. “Totalsports.com (the company that hosted the site) went out of business last week,” Fink said. “We were informed Thursday that it would be gone by Friday.” Fink said until a new site could be established, users will be redirected from the gofrogs.com Web site to a section of the TCU Web site that will display sports updates. Totalsports.com has been home to gofrogs.com since its inception and has hosted more than 60 collegiate athletics Web sites, many of which are still running. Fink said the sites that are still up are running for a variety of reasons. “Totalsports.com’s server will now be up through the weekend,” Fink said. “(We were given the option) to either pay one of their editors to post our releases, or we could do it (ourselves). Many of the universities that still have the sites up are managing (the sites) themselves. Others may be paying totalsports.com to put their releases up.” Fink said with the uncertainty surrounding the future of the totalsports.com server, posting sports information on the TCU site was the best decision. “We didn’t really know when the server was going down, so we tried to move all of our information to the tcu.edu server so that there would be no downtime,” Fink said. “Our thought was to keep the information updated, and we thought this was the best short-term solution.” Although immediate plans for a site similar to gofrogs.com are still up in the air, Fink said he had been talking with a company similar to totalsports.com to host the site. “Fansonly.com is a similar company that hosts university Web sites, with the only difference being that the university would have to pay for the site,” Fink said. Fink said fansonly.com is working with totalsports.com to take control of each school’s Web site as early as next week. “Fansonly(.com) could host the Web sites until June 1 for no fee,” Fink said. “After that, the schools would have to pay for the site. Fansonly(.com) has quoted me somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 for a year of service.” Fink said although the cost could become a budget issue, having to pay for a Web site is inevitable. “Budget is always an issue,” he said. “But if you are going to have a Web site, either in house or not, there are going to have to be some costs involved.” Until the new site is up, athletics releases can be found at (http://tcu.pressrelease.com) or through the link provided on the gofrogs.com Web site.
Victor Drabicky |