G1VVP / Skegness DX - Site Reorganisation

I have been paying for domains and hosting since the turn of the century ("millennium", actually - doesn't that make me sound incredibly old?!! :O) I got to thinking that this was unnecessary in this day and age as there are so many free online sites where you can host your hobby web pages and store many types of file, each without cost. Why bother paying? When I added together the cost of my domains and hosting packages I worked out that I was paying about £150 per year. "Stop" I told myself.

Things used to be different. For instance, the Skywaves domain and hosting was bought when Skywaves began to embrace online technology around the year 2000 and, reluctantly, ceased to produce its monthly printed bulletin shortly afterwards, running entirely via electronic media on the web. Back then we had a web presence with a club website and there were two Yahoo forums. The move proved to be a good one in some ways. For a start, it encouraged many more members to join and offered greater ease for members to contribute and interact. It was free! Whereas the cost of the Skywaves domain and its hosting was mostly covered by voluntary donations to begin with. These slowly dried up. Personally, I was sad to see the end of the hard copy of Skywaves - something you could actually touch and smell, but that's 'progress' for you and it did turn out to be worthwhile, growing the membership substantially. For me though, it was the same as abandoning your CD or vinyl collection in favour of mp3 files. Sadly necessary in a way, but nowhere near as romantic.

During Christmas 2012 I also decided to begin the transition of moving my own personal and paid-for web pages to a free blog and make use of free file sharing sites. I looked at Wix to begin with, which is an excellent free site-builder, but I quickly opted for something simpler and settled here with Blogspot. I also use various other free filesharing sites such as Box (DX recordings), Mediafire (larger files such as Perseus recordings), Photobucket (photos, obviously) and YouTube (videos). I have also just started to use Google Sites "here" so I can keep an online reference and backup of my personal DX logs and recording links. It makes sense and I really don't see the point in continuing to pay for something simple which is only hobby-related. This whole transition may be a lengthy process though and I will add a few bits and pieces each week.

The only service I feel I still need to pay for is a personal email address, which I find can have a few useful advantages over free email services such as Gmail or Yahoo. Mail forwarding is one of them and this is less than straight-forward with services such as Gmail, though I have to give praise to Gmail for their excellent spam filtering.

So, over the coming weeks and months, I plan to add a lot more media to my "Google Site", including lots of personal DX recordings (I discovered a huge stack of these this afternoon which were previously missing), photos and various other related files.