Should I pull the plug on the blog? 🔌

I’m back to thinking about that again. I decided not to auto renew my blog but I still have to October 23rd to make up my mind and pay the $530 fee for the next three years. Indeed the cost is the big sticking point but also a recent email from the hosting company suggesting an up sell to an even more expensive contract due to the size of my blog – 36 gigabytes as they’re enforcing a 40 gig quota come November 1st as unlimited storage with their plus plan comes to an end. Somehow that rubs me the wrong way with the higher costs all around.

I’ve been considering my alternatives. One is to pull the plug on the blog come November. Another is to change web hosts. Or I could improve the efficiency of my data management system and or purge the oldest photos and maps which rarely get served and don’t add much value. The PDFs for maps take up a lot of space but get few downloads compared to the JPEG versions. Lossless compression could be increased, duplicated maps and scaled data deleted. I’ve also thought about embracing advertising, especially on the maps and archives pages which are mostly search engine traffic. Indeed if I were to embrace advertising it would be a revenue neutral proposition.