I’ve once again run into a dead end with WordPress.com. You may or may not be aware of the fact that I’ve had to remove literally thousands of posts due to WP.com not allowing it’s users to purchase individual storage space upgrades. Instead, they force you to purchase that damned $300 per year Business plan.
Or start removing content you’ve worked hard to produce. I’ve been in contact with WP.com via email yesterday and today about this. All they tell me is basically too bad, sucker. Purchase our Business plan or go somewhere else. And that my friends is what I am going to do.
This move will take time to figure out which way I want to go but it must happen. I put out a lot of content each month and have apparently outgrown what WP.com can offer these days. There was a time when you actually could buy more space but the morons that run this service have become greedy and I’ve had enough.
By the way, I’ve tried that business plan, it broke this site. WP.com sucks.
Oh dear John, you know I am your follower wherever you go… but I hope the problem to be solved soon by wordpress.. I will read all comments in here, especially with David… Thank you for all sharing, Love, nia
Thanks Nia! I’ll be staying right here. 😎
Let me know when you find a better home for your blog John. I’ll be joining you!!
Hi Richard, I’ll stay where I am for now. As though it is tangible… 😎
I’ll stay here for now, still looking into options. Thanks!
Bummer! Sorry to hear about this headache. Let us know if you relocate.
Hi Sandra! At this point after checking a few options, I’ll stay put here. This is really my fault as I do reduce file sizes but not as far as I could of and should have. Still some things I want to check but I really don’t want to leave WP.com because of the wonderful community here. You just don’t find this on the internet rarely if at all!
Oh good! Glad to hear you’re sticking around. You raise some good points. I have no idea what size my photos are. Need to look into that.
Here’s an example: I have long been resizing my huge files from the Nikon down to about 500 to 800kb’s but I should have been shrinking them even more. This entire discussion in this thread today has reminded me of something I should have been doing. This is also why you see so few videos here. I am talking to Dropbox about storage there and linking to this site… I used an online file compression service to further reduce the images from those sizes to about 150 to 300kb’s. In time this would make a huge difference in your storage space which in my plan is 13G. WP seriously needs to catch up to the 21st century…
Thank you John, I need to look deeper into this.
Just browsing through the wordpress reader today and happened to bounce on your blog while exploring. I too feel your pain in regards to the crazy plans wp(.com) offers. At the lowest two plans, the storage is great if you are not a person who consistently uploads large high quality images, or music and videos, but the features given to you are basic at best. There is however a great community of bloggers easily accessible that allows you to find great blogs to follow or others to find and follow you. I haven’t seen this type of community anywhere except in the far past of blogger, however blogger pretty much killed their blog community years ago. I don’t even think it exists over there any more. I used to use them but they do not keep up with great blogging platform technology and haven’t for years. I used to self host my own website with wordpress through a host called Powweb. I really good host, but I found it hard to attract visitors to my site just starting out, although it was great being able to add any plugins I wanted to my wordpress set up that way. I discovered wp.com and loved that it had a community and am currently grateful for it. Fortunately for me I don’t go through my storage space too fast, but I’m also going through periods where I don’t get to work on my website as often as I want to lately. I dread the time to come in the future when I may actually need a plan that offers more than 13GB that the Premium plan currently offers. I do not wish to go on their “Business” plan because if you do that, they will block your website from the blogging community in their ecosystem. So basically they want you to fork out $300 a year and eliminate any blog traffic you are getting from the contained blogging community on their platform all in the name of “security” because with the Business plan you can install plugins. There are a lot of up’s and down’s both good and bad with WP’s service. I too have sent them emails about this and I think that they should offer storage packages along side of their plans.
David, thanks for your comment! Indeed WP seriously needs to dump that stupid Business plan, such a joke. I am looking into using my Dropbox account to host my photos, perhaps Flickr as well. I’ve deleted far too many posts and am sick of doing that, it’s bullshit.
I too tried self hosting a long time ago, I didn’t like the way the whole thing worked even with the WP Plugin that’s supposed to interface the .com side with the .org side. You are spot on about the community here on WP, it’s what has kept me here for many years. I don’t want to lose that.
Hence, an external image and video host seems the best solution. WP doesn’t seem to give a shit about blogs they host and I made this very very clear with them in an email this morning.
They are clearly behind the times when it comes to updating their plans. I know that there are some high profile companies like some news associations that use WP and probably can afford to invest in the Business plan, but not every one is that high profile and the current plans aren’t fitting for everyone. I hope they do something better soon. We shouldn’t have to resort to 3rd party hosting for some things to manage our websites. Hope you find a really solution for your needs.
The editor is all jacked up too in my opinion. The Gutenberg thing is total trash. No thanks. The Legacy editor is much better yet it’s mixed with the funny coloured “other editor”? Why! I can afford the three hundred bucks but simply won’t do that.
I tried an online file compression site, it takes the images down to around 250kb or so, smaller than what I usually upload. Are you a business? I have not allowed businesses to follow this blog since it’s inception. They toss the follower count off, but then I have so few anyway…
Not here for the follower count.
I was opposed to Gutenburg at first myself but have honestly grown to love it. It has a feature called “reusable blocks”. I use that feature to place footer blocks in all my posts and pages. It makes it very easy to update the whole site at once with any new important information. As for your question, I am a photographer who publishes ebooks with my outdoor photography. What exactly are you here for if you don’t want followers viewing your content and getting notifications of your content? Isn’t that the purpose of blogging to begin with?
I tried that editor once, it was so confusing. My take on businesses here is that they one way or another, make money from people’s blogs indirectly or otherwise. I don’t like that one bit.
I understand what you’re saying. I think you’re referring to people who claim they can bring you 1,000 site visits per day, or put your site on the first page of a google search. Nope that’s not my game at all and I despise those folks myself. I have been into photography at an amatuer level for many many years. Mostly cellphone photography up until 2016 when I invested in a Canon bridge style camera. I love doing outdoor photography around the lakes in my home area on the Alabama and Georgia state line. For years I wanted to publish my own digital magazine ebook series of some sort. I came to the decision to do it based off my photography for people who enjoy the outdoors. It’s a running series that starts with almost all of my photos taken starting in 2016 with that camera of which as if this comment I am still using. It features scenery, some wildlife, and shore dweller and boater/fisherman photography. So in the act of following other bloggers and their similar or not so similar wirk, I don’t make any money from bloggers, or their websites. My only income from my project is directly from sales of my own self edited and published ebooks. May I suggest watching some videos about Gutenburg on YouTube and how it functions? Doing that really helped me in my adjustment to it. I don’t even use the old editor any more, especially since Gutenburg does allow you to edit blocks in HTML code if you need to do that. I prefer making any lists I have by coding the HTML for them myself. It’s honestly a versatile editor, but there is a learning curve. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate your insights on these subjects today.
I enjoyed the chat too, David. My comment was not meant to be mean or rude. My thoughts on businesses is that they receive referrals just by being on someones blog with an avatar or perhaps a comment. I’m not making myself clear on this…
My reason for being on WP is to show people the other side of Las Vegas. There is sooo much more to this city than that stupid Strip. I avoid it! 😂
Ahhh, oh yes I understand your opinion about that. Yes there are indeed many people on this platform who abuse the like system as well as comment sections for that purpose. I did not take your comment as being rude, but more a valid concern. There are a lot of fake people on here to be aware of for sure. Unfortunately there isn’t a way to control who likes your posts unless you completely remove the feature from your site, but you can at least monitor and control commenting. “Like spamming” is something I myself despise. I’ve never been to Vegas except once landing at the airport while in the Army in the early 90’s going to Fort Irwin for NTC desert training in the Mohave. It will be great seeing your photos come up in the WordPress Reader.
thanks for understanding what I mean, sorry. It’s also a hassle to to remove the businesses from the Follower list now and then. I plan to keep on going here. I tried an online image compressor, took a 1024×683 image saved at less than 1mb down to 150 to 250kb or so, that will help.
I honestly didn’t know there was ever a way to remove someone from your follower list. I can see that being a handy feature for some major spam blogs that exist on this platform. In regards to compressing images, may I suggest a very simple and free photo viewer/editor called Irfanview. Just google it. With it you can open any image on your computer and save it in it’s original size with a lower quality setting which can dramatically decrease the image size without having to upload a photo to the web and then download it again after obtaining a new file size. I’ve been using that program for many many years.
Oh yes, super easy, Spam followers best describes these knuckle heads. I totally forgot about that program, thanks!! 😂
Spam followers is right and the perfect description! I’m going to have to go through my dashboard and check out this as an option. Thank you as well.
Good. I hit My Site then hit the menu drop-downs. Then hit People. Boom.
My jaw just hit the floor! I did not know that was there. Very handy. My sincere gratitude is given to you for that tip. Thanks!! No need to fear spam followers any more.
I’m glad to help you David! The first time I did this, it took a looong time to boot the many spammers. Hence I have so few followers! That’s OK though. 😎
I don’t have many right now to start with actually, but I only want real people who are actually interested in my content to follow, so now is a great time to start managing that list. I think the act of doing that is actually showing appreciation to the real followers because it leaves more attention on them and their icons in the like lines when you eliminate the spammers 🙂
Thank you David, I couldn’t have said this any better. Good Lord, someone else understands this nonsense too! I’d love to see WP have the many account control options that Instagram has. IG is a whole different beast yet when it comes to managing people, IG is light years ahead.
Yes I really enjoy IG’s follower management system. It’s very easy to block anyone you don’t want following. It would be amazing if WP could set up a follower moderation allowing you to manually approve followers (similar to comment moderation) after having the opportunity to review their blog and determine based on their content whether they’re allowed to follow you or not. It really makes me begin to wonder what WP is doing in regards to making this platform the absolute best it could be. After all it is owned by the company who invented WordPress to start with, and for the costs, it should be superior to any other hosts that allow the WordPress platform to operate on it. Yes these subjects are near and dear to my own heart. I fully understand how joyful and aggravating at the same time this platform through WP can be. I remember when they implemented “endless scrolling” instead of paginated browsing across blogs. I hated it, and still hate it. It makes it difficult for regular viewers to catch up on your blog where they left off if they are the type who enjoy surfing through your blog page by page. Now they have to rely on your categories list and/or archive list. That was implemented a long time ago but it still is irritating although I understand why they did it. Apparently it causes viewers to continue scrolling through your blog which increases page views which apparently is good for them through the search engines.
Good for them, whatever! I despise the endless scroll feature, never use it! I call it “Eterno-Scroll”. Blah… WP could certainly be better than it is! A change in the Board Room would help I suspect.
Beste John,
Nu even niet in het engels, ik hoop dat je het kunt vertalen.
Dit is bij mij ook het geval … de ruimte die je krijgt is te klein als je alles wilt houden en als je je foto’s niet een beetje verkleind met photoshop of ander programma dan kan je niet veel foto’s plaatsen.
Wat je vrienden schrijven over een ander platform moet je zeker overwegen en eens bekijken.
Ik heb ook een flickr account en je kan daar inderdaad 1000 foto’s plaatsen zonder beperkingen !
Een ander mooi platform is YouPic waar je als gratis account iedere 12 uur ook een foto kan plaatsen !
Je hebt dan ook nog 500PX maar deze site heeft de laatste tijd veel problemen en daar is 1 foto per dag !
Het zou jammer zijn moest je de site verlaten of overweeg eens om iets extra erbij te nemen om te proberen ! Als het gratis is kan je het altijd proberen !Ik hoop dat je hier iets aan hebt !
I wish you a good evening John!
Inge, I can’t read your comment as I don’t speak your language.
ughghg, I just found you too! However, I used to do Blogger and had many photos and content up. As long as you have the cloud over there you can upload a loadful. I changed to wordpress thinking it was a faster for loading, but they have made progress and have great themes you can change through CSS and all FREE. So I may be following you too. Also, no one has to sign in to read or get to your blog there. It is an easy changeover also.
I used Blogger years ago, got away from it because WP seemed better, still may be better. I’ve never looked at Blogger since and don’t want anything to do with Google. I am looking into other storage options this morning per suggestions from my great friends here! I really don’t want to migrate this blog to the WP.org side… I’ll give this a couple days or so to research better storage options.
Let us know what you plan to do. I will be interested to hear what you found out.
Will do, Kathleen! I’m still thinking about this. 😂
I don’t think that you have to store your images on wordpress. You can add them to a post in the html editor with a link someplace where they are cheaper to store. I just tried that with a draft post and it worked well enough.
You can store up to a thousand images on Flickr until you have to upgrade to pro. There are other places but I generally use Flickr. It should be easy to add to your post using the img html tag. If you go to the HTML editor and the img button, you can then paste a url to your photo and there it will be.
I’ve never stored images anyplace else Jason, thanks for the idea. I suppose I could use my Dropbox account?
Does the Dropbox account let you create a link to the image stored there? I have no idea as I have not used Dropbox. I know I can’t cleanly do that with OneDrive, but I can synch OneDrive to my computer and work out of it like a normal folder.
Flickr Pro is unlimited and pretty cheap compared to a business plan here.
Isn’t Flickr a part of Yahoo? I don’t like Yahoo.
Yahoo sold Flickr a year or so ago to Smugmug, so it isn’t Yahoo anymore.
Oh, that’s great news!!
There are other image hosting sites out there, I just don’t have much experience with them.
When I reach my WordPress storage limit, I will probably switch to Flickr hosting as it is cheaper than upgrading. I am not quite halfway through it yet.
I usually scale my images to 1080 on the vertical side.
I use 1024×683 but haven’t reduced the image quality, always uploaded at that resolution. That’s my fault, Jason. May be responsible for the storage issue…
You should be able post photos at whatever resolution you want. It’s your blog.
On Flickr it is 1000 images regardless of image size, so you can host full resolution. If you subscribe to Pro, it is unlimited images.
How annoying!!!
Hi Dave, it sure is! Have some choices to make… If it weren’t for the wonderful community I’ve found on WP, I would have left long ago… I have online friends i n several countries via WP.
So sorry to read this. Hope you can sort something out, John.
Thank you, Dina! Me too, I’m just sooo frustrated with the restraints imposed by WP.com!
You need to make your photos small when you post them. Reduce them to 200 Kbs each or smaller. When I post photos I set them at 1024×683 or equivalent, low resolution, so most of the photos I post are 200 Kbs each or less. For 9 years I had the basic free plan with 5GB of space. I post on average around 1,100 photos a year. Over 9 years I had used up only 16% of the 5GB with around 9,000 photos.
I had to sign up for the $100/year plan in order to post music and videos. The music and videos are much larger files of course — hundreds of megabytes instead of kilobytes like my photos. Now I’m into my 10th year of blogging. I have 13GB of storage under my current plan. I have used 30% of it now with over 11,000 photos and a handful of songs and music videos. If I continue posting songs and music videos, I’ll have to upgrade to the $300/year plan before long.
Going back, reducing the size of your photos and reposting them will be a major pain. But deleting photos from posts to reclaim space is a major pain as well. You have to weigh the options. Is it worth the trouble to delete photos or posts, reduce photos and re-upload them, our simply upchuck the 300 bucks?
Hi Tim, I’ve tried that Business plan, it broke this site. Things didn’t function well. I use the same photo size you do at 1024×683, but how can you reduce the resolution more? 200kb? I despise removing my content and won’t go back through thousands of posts to resize images, way too much work and time.
What photo editor do you use? Most editors have the ability to export or save photos to jpeg at varying resolutions. I use Photoshop and use the image processor to do bulk resizing the images and reducing the file sizes. Photoshop still has “Save for Web” which will reduce the file sized to well under 100 Kbs, but since I often post several photos in a post I almost always use the image processor.
Reading this reminded me where that photo re-size can be changed, I never use it though. Always upload at 1024×683 as-is. Ooops. My fault. Damn…
I use the Legacy editor, the Gutenberg editor sucks. Another WP blunder in my opinion. Perhaps I should just clean house with the posts and start over with much smaller image sizes… Believe it or not, there are currently 3,019 posts on this site, Tim…
I have a little over 2900 posts on WP, but there were 3 years I was uing the blog on my Zenfolio site. I only do one post a day.
One post per day, I noticed. I’ve run this blog very differently by uploading admittedly too much.
It’s not too much, but too large. Everyone has their own way of blogging. There is nothing wrong with splitting up themes like you do. But with the size of images these days, you have to reduce the file sizes.
I value your thoughts Tim, thank you! I’ll try a file size reduction next time. Perhaps I’ve augmented this problem by not properly reducing the too many photos I upload! 😑
Also, I have 896 Kbps upload speed where I live, so I’ve always had to reduce file size to be able to upload photos. It takes hours to upload videos. I’m trying to get faster upload speed out here.
I feel your pain with that speed issue Tim. I had dialup in Michigan but have super fast cable here via Cox. I guess that adds to the space problem I’m having to some degree.
I’ve had DSL for 20 years, but I can’t get faster upload speeds on the copper that comes to my pole. I had all the wiring into the house upgraded when I did a electrical upgrade in 2013, but that doesn’t matter if the lines to my pole aren’t upgraded. Comcast is telling me I can get Gigabyte Internet through them now. I don’t believe them, but their intro offer is reasonable so I will probably try it.
They should be able to give you far better than 900kb speed. My cable is 30mb up and 300mb down which is so nice. We were promised DSL at my old home in Michigan located in the sticks, but it never happened. Great eh?
We are just north of Albuquerque, but considered the sticks. Cell service sucks and slow Internet. I have the same problem in at the office in downtown Albuquerque. We are in the second oldest building still standing in downtown. Or block also has the oldest wiring in Albuquerque. All the service provides are just now getting fiber within 200 feet of our block. Currently, we use high speed wireless for our Internet. Yeah!
Ten years ago I needed to do an electrical service upgrade in the two buildings we occupy at the office. The infrastructure is so old and such a mess on our block that PNM didn’t want to deal with it so they offered to drop 400 volts at our back do for $80,000. Then we would have to pay another $30,000 to bring the power it into the building.
A very nice, customer-friendly engineer who worked for PNM came up with a much better solution at a fraction of the cost. We implemented it, and she ultimately lost her job over our upgrade, and a few other customer-friendly solutions she had implemented. However, she ended up with a much better job.
This is really bad. Hope you get a better deal soon and can post with peace of mind.
Thanks, I hope so too.
Keep everybody posted……..
Thanks guys, I’m so sick of this BS… I could start uploading just once per day – not the way I run this blog. But do I put out too much content?
It’s your blog, you should post as much content as you want. Readers will decide how much or how little they choose to open and/or read.
Thank you, I totally agree! I so enjoy working with photo processing and of course creating content. I feel like my back is against the wall with the amount of content I create. I’ll probably search for a good web design and host company around Vegas to find options…