Good News / Bad News

This week we bit the bullet and signed up for SBC/Yahoo! DSL service. The good news is that it works great &#150 we’re getting about 1.2 MB/sec on the download side, and it only took about an hour to get the new wireless router to work, so I’m blogging from my wireless laptop and it works from anywhere in our yard, including our old metal-sided garage, so that’s cool.

But I just read the fine print, and after a year, instead of the $26.95/mo that we’re at now (and this from responding to the ads during American Idol touting a rate of $19.95) the fine print says we’ll be paying the standard rate of $49.95 from then on. Oh well, beats dial-up, right?

But I’m really concerned about how to do this blog! Right now, I’ve got 25 MB of content at Inreach.com, and Yahoo! doesn’t have any “free” hosting except Geocities with ads, which is unacceptable, not only because of the ads, but because you can’t FTP content. They have an “upload tool” that does one file at a time, and I’d like to migrate the whole 25 MB, pictures and all.

So, as I understand it, my options are to pay for an upgrade to the tune of $4.95 – $8.95 a month to have an ad-free Geocities account with FTP access, to keep my existing setup with Inreach at $18.50/mo, or to go with some other free but awkward solution like Asparaguspee.blogspot.com, and use Picasa’s Hello bloggerbot to upload and host the pictures?

Any advice from my blogger buddies would be more than welcome.

And changing all the setups at Blogrolling, Sitemeter, Haloscan, Sacramento’s Top 25, Blogger, etc., and losing all my existing pagerank mojo on Google? Oh my.