Anachostic

Technologically-speaking, that is.

A couple days ago, I got an email from the new owners of Flickr.  They were asking for money because they are losing money, despite their best attempts at making Flickr self-sufficient.  I use Flickr to host images for a few different purposes and over the years I’ve had a paid account with them on and off.  Currently, I’m off because I don’t need that much.  Their email sent me into an extended evaluation of self-sufficiency.  It’s pretty well-known anymore that if you want something on the Internet, you’re going to have to pay for it.  If you’re not paying for it, you really are paying for it in ways you may not be taking seriously. 

Having been on the Internet for a very long time, I’ve seen plenty of websites come and go.  Some of the changes have impacted me directly and others haven’t.  Some websites I’ve been forced off of (mostly Microsoft stuff), and some I’ve left voluntarily.  But in this new era of the Internet, I’m going to start viewing anything I’m getting for free as a potential risk.  You have to consider that at any time, it could be taken away from you.

So my first train of thought was, I’ll get a paid account at Flickr.  But then I thought, I am already paying for a web/email server already, why don’t I just use that?  Why don’t I use that?  Well, the primary reason is that images take up a lot of space and my server doesn’t have a lot of space to spare.  Just to verify, my server has a 60GB hard drive in it and I have 36GB free.  I’m so stingy, crying poor with bread in each hand.  But hey, 30GB can go FAST if you don’t watch out.  And my mentality at the time was to put the burden on other services where I could as long as it didn’t cost me.

So, I did some quick research to see if I could add more space to my server for the same or less than paying for an account at Flickr.  Short answer: no.  I could move up to a 60GB drive for about $120 extra a year.  That’s like 2 Flickr accounts.  So Flickr is still the better choice.  However, after reading some commentary online, I started to think, will it matter?  If Flickr is in financial trouble now and has been in trouble for a very long time, maybe it’s just time to call it a day.

Ok, so let’s have a look at exactly how much space I’m using here.  I downloaded all my Flickr images for my blog and that’s 20mb.  I looked at the images in my media section for this blog and it’s about 30mb.  I have less than 100mb of images and I’m worrying about blowing 30GB of space?  I’m so pessimistic.

Knowing I have so little media on my blogs, I could just host it with WordPress.  WordPress offers 3GB of media hosting per account and I wouldn’t be even close to touching that on either blog, so that’s a viable option… except, WordPress is a free site.  That’s what I’m trying to get away from.  Granted, I’ve never heard that they have ever been financially strapped, so bravo for them.  Still, the Internet is evolving, what is true today may not mean anything in a couple of months.

So again, that points me in the same direction I was looking at earlier.  Hosting the blogs, with all their respective images on my own server.  They will certainly fit in the 30GB of space I have available.  The one thing I will lose is the power of the WordPress domain name and the followers/community that goes along with it.  The other thing I’m going to lose is all of my content when I die.  When I die, my web server isn’t going to get paid for anymore, so it will all go goodbye.  It’s actually kind of comforting in some ways, that whole “right to be forgotten” stuff that’s big in the EU right now.

So that’s the plan for 2020, moving on.