The Price you have to pay for whatever is Free Online

4 replies
We have no control over our Squidoo lenses. Nobody asks us if we agree with various changes that suddenly happen in our lenses, and we have to simply accept them without complaining. I don't like this position.

This is what happens when you use free platforms. I lost 4 blogspot blogs in 2009 and Blogger never helped me recuperate them. Therefore, whatever is free online does have a price, only that you cannot see how much you are going to pay for it before you have a damage.

Does it mean that we have to stop using free platforms? No, of course not. They are fantastic! However, we have to be careful and always expect having strange problems, and suddenly lose all our work.

Squidoo lenses are safer than blogspot blogs I guess; only that you have to get adapted to various rules, which keep changing all the time (!), but you can simply accept the rules and adjust all your lenses according to the new requirements. You are going to waste your time, especially if you have many lenses, but this is not such a big deal. You can simply accept the rules, either you like them or not, and use this fantastic platform to create many lenses.

I guess you are safe, if you simply accept the rules and your lenses are OK. You can read all the rules, and ask other lensmasters in the Squidu forum about them if you have a doubt. Most lensmasters are very friendly in the Squidu forum, and it's very good for you to leave comments in other lenses, and receive comments from other lensmasters in your lenses. This movement attracts traffic from Google. You should also answer the comments you receive in your lenses, unless the commenter will simply write something empty like 'Nice lens'. When the commenter writes a few words about what you are talking about in your lens, you should give an answer to the commenter; and say something else. Agree with the comment, give another example, etc. This movement attracts traffic from the search engines.

However, have always in mind that when you use free platforms you are not really safe. If you want to be serious about your work, you have to have a domain name, etc. I use free platforms basically as a promotional method. Don't put all your eggs in this basket.




#free #online #pay #price
  • Profile picture of the author Paul Myers
    Excellent point.

    I'm working on a new blog, and one of the first things I did was set up a system for writing posts in a text editor and saving them to my local hard drive. They'll also be stored in an online backup system.

    The second part of the process is to set up a regular schedule and system for backing up all the blog files, and the database, with time stamps showing when the backups are created. The most recent 3 of those will also be stored in an online backup system.

    This is for a blog hosted on one of my servers, not on a free service. You can just as easily lose all your work in case of a drive crash, cracked server or Wordpress security exploit as when some free hosting system decides they don't like your content. Or just shuts down entirely.

    Backup systems are always a good idea. And there's more than one kind.


    Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by clever7 View Post

    This is what happens when you use free platforms.

    Sometimes; not always.

    It's not the fact that they're free that gives you those problems.

    It's the fact that they have terms of service that facilitate them.

    Hosting at byethost.com is available free, and has none of those problems.

    Originally Posted by clever7 View Post

    I lost 4 blogspot blogs in 2009 and Blogger never helped me recuperate them.


    I hear you, and wouldn't use those, myself, for exactly that reason.

    But again, it's not the fact that they're free that causes the problem: it's their terms of service and often inconsistent and idiosyncratic interpretations of them. There are also free online facilities that don't have those problems.
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  • Profile picture of the author clever7
    There is no real safety online especially because of the hackers. They can easily provoke many damages and there is no way you can catch them. My blogspot blogs were suddenly all contaminated by malware when an intruder got my passwords. This fact happened exactly when a commenter had left a long comment in one of my blogspot blogs, which was regularly appearing in the first page of Google when someone would type in its main keywords. It looks like my enemies (competitors? People who disagree with me? I don’t know) provoked this problem on purpose because they didn’t like my blog’s success. This blog got contaminated and I had no access to it through my dashboard. Then, my other 3 blogs got contaminated by malware too. Google never helped me recuperate these 4 very informative blogs; Blogger is a chaos.

    This is another problem when you depend on free platforms. You cannot ‘call the boss’ and complain because you are not satisfied with something. If you have a problem and you depend on Google for a solution, you are in a very bad situation.
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  • Profile picture of the author 82ana
    Paid or free. You gotta have back up. Just no slithering your way around it.
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