Ha! That title sucked you in, didn’t it?
Sorry to say but this post is more related to how my continued blogging is not as straight-forward and hassle free as it used to be. When I was with one of my former web hosts – FatCow, drive space – all the little files and pictures were simply tools that I used in order to visually express my opinion on a matter or to get over to you dear reader what I saw whilst I was out and about or what I might hope to witness whilst I was walking and y’know; getting lost ‘cos I can’t follow a map for love nor money!
A couple of changes of web host later and oh my is web space in general an issue. My current web host keeps their costs down a bit by essentially not giving its’ customers masses to play with! Here are the tariffs:
- WiserSTART BUY NOW £24 500 MB
- WiserBIZ BUY NOW £55 1000 MB
- WiserPROBUY NOW £140 2000 MB
I am on the “WiserBiz” package.
I have checked across a number of UK Based Web Hosts and these are pretty much the norm. However, our modern digital cameras are completely oblivious to this! They could not care less…to be honest they are insensate objects and technically do not care at all…about anything! The norm these days is around about fourteen mega-pixels for a dedicated digital camera and around eight mega-pixels for a smartphone. Now if we were all taking photographs of a raven in a coal mine (and who wouldn’t?) then the size of the resulting file would be minimal – essentially we could turn off all the bumf etc and have a file of just a few kilobytes. There are not many uses for a subterranean Raven, It wouldn’t show up well, the animal rights people would be all over you for risking the bird’s life, it would probably peck you in the face…essentially I am using the Raven scenario just to point out an absolute minimum in photographic filesizes. Once we introduce colour to the process of taking photographs intended for the web then although there maybe a formula for calculating the file size – I’m not aware of it, I think it’s safe to say that the more colours, the bigger the file.
This then is where I am at now. Right now I am having to go through my WordPress uploads and delete a lot of the files that are just too big, that are using up my one gigabyte of space and it’s not a task that I relish very much let me tell you. Of course WordPress being the inefficient bloatware that it is; does not facilitate me in my quest to save space. Every time that I add a photo to a post essentially three files are added. Every time that I reset my header background photo…three files are added to the media repository and let me tell you that impacts massively.
WordPress has gone through a bit of a change in the last few editions in that the Media section of the dashboard is a bit messed up and files that one has manually uploaded (using the still excellent FileZilla) to a certain folder (usually in year/month format) are not automatically picked up by WordPress and added to the media section of the dashboard – I’m sure that was not always the case. From there one then has to go and manually tinker or even worse download a plugin to do this for you and …they make a right old Pig’s ear of the job! After this process it is not uncommon to end up with six or even twelve versions of varying sizes of the same file…sigh!
All this is a far cry from how easy to use WordPress once was, oh sure one day I might get a reasonably priced web host who is happy to give me bucket loads of space…I’m willing to bet that in such a scenario the pages of said website will set new records in just how slowly a photo-laden web page can load.
Back to my web hosts once more and it was with shock I received and email from myself (really don’t remember setting that up!) to say that I was almost out of web space. I immediately summised that this would probably be due to a backup, logged a call to the host’s support department and lo and behold it was not their backup using up shed loads of my space but one that I had set up with the Installatron software used to install WordPress on my host’s server. Quickly enough I have now removed the backups from that location – one was around 7Mb however the other was a staggering 450+Mb. Ouch! I have now diverted the backup so that the files are sent to my Dropbox account where thankfully I do still have a few gigabytes left…and in due coarse this will now be quietly delivered to every devices where I happen to have Dropbox running …ooopss that’s my Slate, laptop, Iphone and work’s PC. Oh well there’s no substitute for backing up is there!
My next post will feature some actually walking related content…I promise!