Here We Go Again

I am very active on the internet and I use many parts of it to my benefit. Besides the usual web surfing, shopping, and things that people usually do, I also have many places with my personal files and pictures on them.

Finding web space out there in cyber-land has never been easy. Sure, there are tons of places offering free space to park your own personal website or your personal pictures or whatever, but I have certain standards I look for. Those standards make it tough for just any free site to "make the grade" and prove themselves worthy of my attention and time. Some of the things I look for include:

• Unlimited space - I don't want to run into a size limitation if I have too many files
• No ads - Okay, this one is tough, but I'm willing to live with an ad or two if I have to
• No pop ups - This one is a definite. I will NOT even consider such a place if they have pop ups.
• Speed - I don't want to click on one of my menu items and have it take forever to load the page, right?
• Reliability - This one is a hard one, and the subject of this blog post. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you don't.

My search for free hosting falls into two categories: Site hosting and picture hosting.

My current personal website coexists in two places on the web. Anyone that visits my website will only know about the one that I have provided them the link to. The other one sits quietly in the background in another part of the cyber-galaxy... Ready to spring into action should the main site disappear. It's happened before. I have had the proverbial carpet yanked out from beneath me many times in the past. For whatever reason, the geek that runs the site I may have my files on either sells out, decides to change to another format, or disappears altogether. I am fortunate that the site that hosts my website now is a big one with no limitations and it works very, very well.

That brings me to picture hosting. I am constantly on the search for places to host pictures, and that is tough because of my standards. My requirements for picture hosting include:

• Unlimited space - Pictures can be big you know... Especially nowadays with 10 & 12 megapixel cameras.
• No resizing - For a site to have a dimensional size limit on a picture is ridiculous. It should have options to view pictures either small or original size.
• Albums - Believe it or not, some sites don't allow you to be able to create and manage separate albums, but I think they're becoming fewer.
• Public vs. Private - Some things you don't want to become public and you should be able to have full control over that. The ability to password an album is a plus.

I'm sure I've forgotten some things here, but let's get to the real reason for the post today. My recent favorite picture hosting site seems to have disappeared. I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I never expect things like this to turn around. If they do--Great, if not--Oh well.

When picture hosting sites vanish, it takes a lot of time to re-upload pictures to another site (that is assuming you find a suitable replacement to begin with). It also affects a lot of links from existing web pages.

Well, all I can say is free sites are worth every penny.