Update on Blogging: costs, etc. 

Update on Blogging: costs, etc.

Just within the last few days, I have paid for "premium" service--6 months at $3.00 (U.S.) per month.

Premium Membership means I have 200 MB "Monthly Transfer Limit" and 5MB "Disk Limit".

BlogEasy went down for much of the day today (Friday). This reminds me of warnings from Glenn Reynolds and others that BlogSpot is not to be relied upon. (Update: "Support" has now e-mailed me (10:00 p.m. Friday) to say the problem has been "permanently" solved).

Until recently there was an active site called
"Blogspot Exodus." Readers are now referred to a site called A Stop on the Railroad.

Colby Cosh says he pays $10.00 per month. I'm not sure what kind of support he is using; there is something on his blog that says "XML feed available through the courtesy of Janes' Blogosphere."

Kathy Kinsley is offering to support blogs for either $4.00 or $5.00 per month through [link=www.bloghouse.net]BlogHouse.[/link]. She offers a number of services--some of which I don't understand.

"The First type of account will start as the most inexpensive, at $4 per month, with no set-up fees. You will get 5 e-mail accounts, FTP access, cgi-bin, 75MB disk space and 2 gigs of bandwidth per month (since this is shared space, we'll keep an eye on the disk space and bandwidth for you)."

This looks like ten times as much monthly bandwidth as I am getting, and 15 times as much disc space. I don't know why I would need 5 e-mail accounts, and two of the features she lists mean nothing to me.

She adds:
"I'll be running spam spider blocks and such, so your bandwidth won't be as high as you think it will be! (My hits about halved when I started banning the things.)
"My own blog site, by the way, has never gone over 3 gig in one month, and only once over 2 gig (due to either a glitch in a spider or a troll attack), and I get quite a number of hits. I do keep my pages reasonably sized, which you should (pretty please) do anyway for the sake of people on dial-up. (I'm on dial-up now and some of you take 3 minutes to load!)"
Both Colby and Kathy are running blogs that will be hit by many of the people (like me) who hit Instapundit every day. I don't think I'm going to have that problem.

On the other hand, some people do have problems. One female blogger (I forget which, and I can't find the post now) was worried recently that she was using more space or capacity than she was paying for. She was considering using tools such as spam spider filters. I gather (as a lay person, guessing) a spam spider is a program that will launch messages to many sites at once, and often to the same site many times in one day. A filter will block such "automatic" communications, and avoid the clogging of your capacity.

I think "spidering" can also mean searching through a lot of data. According to this site, it means using a "robot" to follow links. Your employer can "spider" through your e-mail or your hard-drive, most likely word searching for words that suggest porn, time-consuming personal stuff or humour, etc.

Thus endeth the poorly-informed technology lesson.