Online Storage Space Reduced - More Incentive to Find Other Solutions

So the following notice showed up in my email earlier in the week:

That’s weird. I haven’t posted to that blog in… I don’t remember, since 2020. How is it that I’m now over-storage capacity? My first thought was that this was some kind of scam, spoofing my website so that the evil cretins could get my password some how. But no, when I logged in this morning it showed that I had 4.7GBs of used media space on a 3GB account. My best guess is that WordPress.com changed their free-website storage level from the previous 5GB to now 3GB at the beginning of the month (unannounced as far as I could tell), and that landed that website in jeopardy. So, I spent the afternoon wiping out images and posts that would have swallowed up a lot of space in order to reduce the image storage footprint of this site (newer images stored at higher resolutions; in 2017 I hadn’t figured out that web-stuff should be posted at the lowest possible resolution). That really got me to thinking that I should just eliminate all online images galleries and convert them to YouTube video slides and only store stuff online for others who might actually be interested in getting their own copies. Hmmm. Much to think about here.

Just as media capabilities expand tremendously, free storage options shrink. It kind of reminds me of when I moved to Las Vegas and got Cox’s “high speed” Internet service for $50 per month, but what they didn’t tell me was that there was a download cap that made it expensive to actually use the service to the fullest extent of it’s capacity. This was 2017, so I was maybe watching Standard Def or lower resolution YouTube videos at most. I don’t remember what the monthly cap was, but it was probably 1GB or something like that and the over-cap fee was high enough that signing up for their “unlimited” option for another $80 dollars made sense. Thus the monthly Internet cost jumped from $50 to $150 per month and it was not that fast. This business of WordPress capping free storage at 3GB is silly. And it encourages me to look for other ways to share my media projects, or whether I should bother at all.

I’ve been busy for the past two weeks working through my journals from the late 1980s, getting them into a format that would lend itself to an actual electronic book format or other storage/archiving ideas. In the past I would be working toward digitizing everything so that I could put the work on an online accessible platform so that the work wouldn’t be limited to single copies that could be easily lost or destroyed. I’m so sure of that solution any more. My guess is that so much of all of this will be lost through services just going away or corporate greed or the old Internet just going away. “It’s just dust in the wind.” I have to find a better way that doesn’t cost $38,000 (see story linked below).

Sources: