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All good things must come to an end. Woe! Don't freak out--I'm talking free web space. :P
I do believe the time has come for me to purchase web space. For 10 years now I've had free access to one of my first internet friend's private servers, but my pages haven't loaded on it for almost a week. Looks like he let his domain name service expire. I've been trying to get in touch with him for three months--long before this happened--but no reply. I did some obituary searches for the hell of it, and no results came up.
Anyway, one big thing concerns me about wherever my future sites end up: my sites will be image heavy, which means I need a lot of room and a lot of bandwidth. For that reason, I'm thinking Yahoo. $10 a month if you sign up for a year, ftp access, unlimited space and bandwidth. Sounds good to me. I did poke around the local options available here in OR, but either they cost a fortune, you have to pay extra for heavy traffic, they were profoundly bashed in reviews, and one company was stated as run by devout Mormons who don't allow anything hosted by them that they find objectionable. I'm thinking they would not approve of my pro-BL/yaoi/slash content. :P
Which leads me to domain names. Should I use my full name? Should I use my LJ ID? I dunno. My name would be the best thing, I guess. You know, to start building recognition. But that makes me nervous for some reason. I don't like it when someone comments here in my journal using my real name.
Anyway, one thing I now have to decide is if I want to transfer all four of my fan sites to pro space: my fanfic recs page, my old anime music site, my Fushigi Yuugi site, and my scanlation site. The ficrecs page is a definite. The music site...I'm willing to let it vanish into the depths of the net. I haven't updated it in almost 4 years, and Anime News Network's Encyclopedia has far surpassed my op/ed listings. The FY site I'm more hesitant to let go, but I don't have the time to work on it any more, and haven't updated it in years either. I lost the spark for it when a well-meaning fan told me most people visited for my episode screen caps and didn't care about the written content at all. NICE. And finally we have the scanlation site. So many people have told me how much they've enjoyed my scanlations, and neither Zetsuai nor Arslan seem prime for licensing anytime soon. *knocks on wood* I genuinely WANT to work on it, which is more than I can say about the music site or the FY one. But what does it say about me if I have technically illegal scanlations on the same URL as my original OMG-please-buy-my-work??? Talk about a mixed message. *headdesk*
....I suppose I could get a 2nd site and host the scanlations under a different URL. An extra $10 a month! Yay! <fangirly voice>A TRUE fan would not even consider that an issue!</fangirly voice> Or maybe Yahoo can do this for me without me having to buy more space?? I'm not sure how it all works. I admit, being able to use my friend's private server all this time has spoiled me.
Any advice???