Having been a loyal user of Radio Userland, with all of its quirks, for 6 months I have finally made the switch over to blogmedia who host the blogware platform. I did a trial switch over to typepad a month or so ago, but it did not go too well and I decided to stick with Radio. But yesterday I ran out of disk space on the Radio Userland server and it went like this …
- So without any notice in my event log, I see that uploads are failing because I have used up my 40MB allocation. 40MB seemed a huge amount for text blog entries, but apparently radio has lots of different renderings and archives it maintains.
- I thought this should be easy – tidy up – but this has proven almost impossible to do cost effectively
- So I thought I will get more disk space, but it’s incredibly expensive. For the same price as I pay for 80MB of space on Radio I can get 1 GB on blogmedia.
I really was not keen to change, because of the effort involved but I was so annoyed last night with trying to free up disk space, (still not resolved 18 hours later!), that I did it.
I made a list of the features I missed in Radio:
- I wanted to be able to create secure areas, multiple authors etc
- I wanted more control over the layout
- I wanted more disk space, I have 1GB now, I used to have 40MB
- I wanted FTP publishing
- I wanted better search
- I wanted better usage statistics
- I wanted an easier to remember url
- Radio performance was dreadful
- There were too many bugs in the client, and I disliked the delay between publishing locally and getting the file published on the web. So I wanted to go web based. I still wanted the option to use a local client, so blogger API support was needed.
In the end I chose blogware for the software, and blogmedia for hosting. I didn’t have much time to make the decision, but I have not regretted it so far! It has taken about 3 hours to move the data over!
