Tag Archives: webadmin

By coincidence, I was thinking that Blogging is Dead right when my hosting bill came up for renewal. I signed up for hosting on a super cheap deal (<$10 for a year) and now I’m paying “normal” price for it – about $80 a year. It’s not a lot of money, but I’m getting a lot less value from it then I did in the past. To a point where I’m thinking, should I even bother renewing?

Well what do I lose?

1. Backups – I used to backup all my music on my host, but they put in some new policy and I was no longer able to do so. I still have all my photos backed up here but the software (Gallery2) is outdated, slow, and buggy. Now I use Google for both music and photo backups. Also my documents are on DropBox, so I don’t need my host for backups anymore!
2. My blog – While I wouldn’t shed a tear if I lose my ability to blog in the future, I have 2500+ blogs which I don’t want to lose. I can probably import them into WordPress.com or similar service. However, what I don’t have a solution for are my web of interconnected links that point back to my blog, as well as all the media that are hosted and inline in those blogs.
3. My email – I don’t need my host to host my email, I just need to be able to forward certain addresses to Gmail. However, I do have some catch-all email domains which I have used to sign up for many many services, and it would be impossible to re-create all of those accounts as part of a transition. I guess I can solve this problem if I find a mail service that does catch-all forwarding as well.
4. My profile – I have my “professional” webpage, which TBH I haven’t looked at in a few years. I think I can get rid of this as everything goes through LinkedIn anyways. I’ll just keep the domain around for email or future use.
5. Various domains and webspace – I have other random domains hanging around which don’t necessarily need which I could park somewhere. Plus, while it’s nice to have webspace to host a file, this isn’t really an issue anymore with DropBox and the like.

To me, the only thing holding me to a host is my blog. Once I’m comfortable of kill it and its history, I can move on. On the other hand, $80/yr is not a lot, and it will cost money to do advanced email forwarding somewhere else, so maybe getting rid of my host is not that much of a savings.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: dropbox, webadmin