There comes a point in every life where hard decisions have to be taken. I am at that point now…
This blog has been part of my hobby life for over 4 years now and I hadn’t realised quite how much it meant to me until I realised that it was time to decide on its future. Some might have noticed that I haven’t posted anything new in the last few weeks.
There is a reason for this…
My free WordPress plan has reached its 3GB storage capacity and, to continue to post here as before, I would need to upgrade to a new plan. There is a personal plan available that would allow me to add another 2-3 years, at my current posting rate, to the blog. Or do I take a more drastic, but cheaper, option and delete older images and posts to free up space allowing me to continue as before.
Upgrading on the cheapest plan appears to offer another 3GB of storage but that means in 2-3 years I would again need to increase the size of the plan at a further cost. From what I can work out, the cost (with one of the regular WordPress deals) would be about £100 a year (plan+retention of domain fee+domain cost). I am not sure that I can justify paying that each year for a simple hobby blog…
I also worry that I will not be able to bring myself to delete any of the older images, however poor or unread my earlier posts may have been, as they make up the first chapters in my blogging history.
A decision needs to be made if I want to keep the blog in its normal format.
…………
Or do I start again? I can leave the current blog ‘as is’, as an archive that I can revisit and reference, and start a whole new blog.
Decisions need to be made… I would welcome any thoughts or ideas you may have… I know that others have reached this point before me and I now call upon their wisdom.
An Archive For The Steinberg Shed Space Blog 
This is something I will have to contemplate in the not to distant future. One thought I had was to create a new site (TIM 2?) and to use that site to transfer bit by bit my much older content. This would leave my existing site and list of followers unchanged but free up space. Some standard wording at the end of each post would direct the reader to the other site if they are interested. Will it work? No idea but unless anyone can tell me it wont then I think I will give it a try.
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I’m hopefully not near this position yet, but I have given it some thought, mainly because I think I’d change the layout of my own blog if I started it again! I can see the dilemma, delete old stuff to make room, but then that record’s gone! If you can afford it, you could upgrade to get the extra space and just see how you go from there, whether you use it enough to keep it going or just decide to let it go, up to you! I think if you do what’s right for you, we’d all be happy enough with that! 🙂
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I know it would be a PITA and time intensive but would deleting, resizing then reuploading your old photos be a possible soloution?
Cheers,
Pete.
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I would say keep the current site, don’t delete those old posts or their pictures, as you say they’re part of the record of what you’ve created and they show the journey of your hobby over the last few years.
Secondly I’d highly recommend resizing pictures if you can (not going back and doing it – that sounds like a hell of a lot of work) but for future posts. For comparison my blog is now six years old (so WordPress told me the other day anyway) and I’ve made 584 posts in that time with god knows how many pictures. However I’ve only used just over 20% of my storage space, just by keeping the image sizes fairly small (except on those occasions when I felt there was a need to post a bigger image).
Thirdly, I’ve thought about what to do when my storage space finally runs out (at this rate that’ll be in the year 2041 – I like to think ahead!). My solution was to start a second blog but never publish it. Carry on posting on your first site but use the storage space of the second site and link all the pictures across. Because you’ll be an admin for both blogs it’s really straightforward to do, and saves all the faff of starting anew (I help to run my partner’s blog so I’ve tested the theory and it works nicely). Hope that helps 🙂
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All of the above are probably more sensible (certainly it seems that Wudugast has given it plenty of thought), but my approach in the end was just to give WordPress some of my money to extend the life of my blog. It’s over 9 years old now so I imagine that either I’ll have lost interest or have enough free money to repeat the process in another 8 years or so when it becomes relevant again.
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I had the same conundrum earlier in the year and I ended up upgrading to a personal plan. One thing I didn’t do was upgrade the domain name. Even though it was ‘free’, I figured that was something that I didn’t want to pay for going forward. I do like Wudugasts option.
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