I talked to my blog hosting service Saturday to try to figure out what happened that bumped my hosting fees up from $179 last year to over $300 this year. The service rep confirmed that the jump in fees was because I was using too much space and that they had moved me to the “unlimited” account level. I could have sworn that I was “unlimited” at the beginning or I would have never thought to host my photography/video portfolio with them if I thought I was going to run into a storage issue. Ugh.
So, for the past two weeks, I figured out how to host my images on my SmugMug site and embed them onto my WordPress site and deleted the images from the expensive WordPress site. I also used a utility so that I could directly see what was being stored on my WordPress server folders and saw that there were a couple full backups and folders from two years ago. I backed up everything from the server to local storage and then deleted everything that I thought was not essential. And I was able to get the storage down from over 80GBs to 43GBs. But, according to the tech, that was still 3GBs too many for me to qualify for the lower storage fee. So I’ve spent the last two days editing my site, particularly my academic portfolio, to point to PDFs that are stored/hosted on my Archive.org account and deleted the PDFs from the WordPress media library.
I’m working my way through my Academic Portfolio, where I originally thought that it’d be cool to post the papers that I wrote all those years ago with the teacher’s comments and notes. Alas, some of these PDF files are over 100 pages and thus over 100MBs.1 Previously I’d stored a number of my PDFs on my Archive.org account, but switched to my WordPress account because I thought it would work better (load quicker, etc.), not realizing that these files were going to cost me over $300 a year in server fees… Over the weekend I’ve finished editing my student portfolio from my time at LMU and Biola and am almost done with the short time I was a student at Fuller Seminary. Besides make sure to move the PDFs to Archive.org and deleting them from my WordPress server, I’ve decided to take the time to transfer and edit the papers written for these courses into HTML as blog posts. It’s a a pain in the butt, at the same time it’s been an amazing weekend revisiting some of the crazy shit I wrote, especially as a college freshman who did not know shit. It was kind of fun all of the research and writing that I did back then, especially my last couple years at Biola and Fuller when I began to question the status quo that I had previously accepted as Truth. I’ll find a way to resurface some of those gems in the future.
In the meantime I still need to trim more “fat” from my WordPress account. At the moment my web-host shows that I am using 42.81GBs of server space. After all of my efforts this weekend I’ve trimmed .69GBs. I still need to trim another 2.81GBs ASAP if I want to get that hosting bill down (of course, even if I get it down, the fee with be $90 more than I paid last year). I’m seriously thinking that I should consider going back to my old WordPress.com website… Ugh. I still have all of my work from CSUF and my two degree programs with Pepperdine. I’d be very surprised if moving those files didn’t get me to the mark I’m hoping for. We’ll see… It’s a good thing that I like doing this stuff. Ack.
Tags: blogging, cutting the fat, expensive tech hobbies, first world problems, tech issues
JosephBruceBustillos.com (website) by Joseph Bruce Bustillos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
FOOTNOTES:- in the pre-computer days, especially at Biola and later at Fuller, I developed a strong habit to xerox everything that I thought might contribute to whatever paper I was throwing together… I can only imagine how much I must have spent copying mostly journal articles, that I later scanned and made into PDFs… big PDFs.[↩]
