Sometimes You Get What You Pay For.
Posted: September 2nd, 2008 | Author: Joe | Filed under: Saving, spending | Tags: blogging, Cheap, hosting | 2 Comments »Case in point: Blog Hosting.
I really should have known better, but the cheap skinflint in me got the better of me.
When I started this blog, I was doing it more or less as a hobby and didn’t want to spend any money. Not a dime. There is so much free software available today, I thought I could do it. The one hitch to the whole approach was hosting.
I found a lot of free hosting sites, but most required ads to be displayed. I didn’t want to plaster my pages with ads – especially if I wasn’t earning any of the revenue and didn’t have control over where they appeared.
Then I discovered delishio.net.
They seemed like a winning proposition. They didn’t post ads on my page. They didn’t cost a dime. They even had some fairly nice templates to choose from. I spent a weekend configuring and selecting plugins and templates, and away I went.
Everything went swimmingly for about 8 months, but a part of me didn’t trust it. There was always an inner voice somewhere saying: “You never get something for free.” So I made a habit of exporting my posts every few posts, thinking that I could at least have a backup if delishio ever pulled the plug.
Well, it’s a good thing I did because that’s what happened.
Regular readers of this blog will have noticed 2 things:
- The site was down for almost two weeks – without warning.
- The site now looks completely different.
Well, long story short – the admin of delishio.net decided that this site constituted either spam or “hardcore porn” and summarily deleted it. Without warning.
I don’t know, maybe this site is like some kind of hardcore finance porn?
Anyway, I can complain ’till the cows come home but the fault is ultimately mine. I paid nothing for blog hosting, and I got what I paid for.
Caveat emptor, baby. Some lessons are harder to learn than others. I read mountains of recommendations saying I should have paid for hosting, and I should have listened.
The moral of this sad tale is to beware the skinflint in all of us, and don’t just go with the cheapest option presented to us; some things are worth the price.
Welcome back, Joe!
Hmmm… hardcore finance porn, eh? That’s not a bad tagline!
Thanks MGL.
It’s good to be back, though it has been a long, strange trip. Well, more of a painful and tedious trip, but still good to be back.