I do not own much of value other than than some computer files. I have gone far too long without having those sensibly organized online. I decided that since I already have hosting arranged for other sites then it surely must be time for me to start hosting all my personal materials.
I moved this blog here from wordpress’s free hosting, to start. It was easy to install and I feel a lot safer just knowing that I am hosting my own files on my own rented server space.
I also am in the process of killing my flickr account. I paid for hosting for one year and one problem I ran into was their not offering a way to download large numbers of photos from the site. The have a program called flickr uploader which gives your pictures to them, but after they are there they want you to take them back one at a time. A lot of those pictures I uploaded during travel and I did not bother trying to save them elsewhere, so those copies are my only copies. I actually wrote to their customer service and they told me that one at a time is the only way to go. It seems entrapping to me. I found an unauthorized program called flickrdown which is pulling my pics (200 at a time, which is the limit for display for unpaid flickr accounts) and I have am rebuilding my files using a program called gallery. Everything is here.
I am using site5 for hosting. I like their interface best of the four other servers I have used in the past. They also have automatic installations for a lot of programs (like wordpress and gallery) which is nice. It means more to me that they were recommended by the server than that they were available for automatic download. I can manage my own installations but deciding what to install has been a bigger problem. I would like to have started with a content management system and then installed other programs about that.
I looked really hard at something called Drupal. It seemed to be a good interface for picture galleries, blogging, personal document storage, and interacting with visitors to my site. Ultimately I decided that I would wait to learn this because I needed some things done now and I learning to use Drupal is not a sure thing. There are a lot of awesome tutorials – even with video – which teach everything a person could want to know about using Drupal. But I am not sure that I have time to learn right now.
One complaint I do have about site5 hosting is that I do not like that they censor. I am sure they are very liberal and free speech, and their rule only says that they do not host “adult content.” I had a friend write to me and ask me if I thought site5 would be a good place for him to host some controversial political writings. He archives all kinds of information and definitely some of this information – mostly text but perhaps also some diagrams or politically troublesome photos – would be illegal to distribute in some countries, and perceivable as being counteractive to certain lobbies in America.
Site5 reserves the right to interpret what “adult content” means. I assume they mean pornography, but then again, people have differing opinions as to what constitutes that. I would like to think that they just want to limit pornography because that is statistically the most likely kind of content to strain a server do to anyone being able to upload mass quantities of it and get a lot of demand for bandwidth. I understand that it is easier to say that they are limiting adult content than to calculate and define just what limits they want to set.
They offer 1500GB storage and 15TB of monthly bandwidth for less than $10 a month. This is impossible to sell assuming that anyone would actually use those amounts of resources. However, most people who use hosting are well below 1GB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth. The group of consumers who consistently have high usage demands are people distributing videos, particularly those videos made by production companies without a paid international police network to enforce their copyrights.
So I can understand that from a sales perspective, pornography is expensive to host. But I feel creeped out that they have any rules as to what I can host. Are political treatises “adult content”? I am hosting an HIV education site, and that certainly relates to sex. The primary difference between adults and youths is sexuality, so I feel like I am hosting adult content. I never even thought of any of this before my friend asked me about hosting his political material, which was kicked of a free hosting site for being hate propaganda. I have read the things he has; I would describe it as centered on unopinionated facts and statistics about various military actions and then collections of commentaries – frequently opposing commentaries – about them. In arguments I frequently disagree with the extremes of both sides of issues, but I still support the right of anyone to distribute whatever ideas they want. I even think it is better to distribute all extremist perspectives on a controversial issue than it is to only distribute one side of an argument in a moderate way, because at least extreme views can be distilled to get the important parts of people’s reactions to dire circumstances.
Someday perhaps I would like to either rent space from someone who does not prohibit me from hosting anything I want or preferably own my own server. Either way, I feel very passionate about the integrity of sex education and I am glad to be able to host Sanjeevani Booti.