Squarespace was down. Again

It is just me or is Squarespace a bit unreliable lately? I am currently typing this on Microsoft Word because the entirety of Squarespace is down, and I have no access to the main portal (I usually type these short blogs on the portal itself; the wordier stuff like the GT3 diaries are typed on Word before exporting). Needlessly to say, my website itself is currently unavailable, too.

It’s quite frustrating.

Not to say my personal website is of any real significance in the grand scheme of the Internet, but this is unacceptable, right? For a web hosting company to be down for any reason, much less at the frequency Squarespace has been experiencing trouble lately. Just a few weeks back, photo hosting was malfunctioning, preventing me from uploading pictures, which for my purposes is largely what my website is based on, so that situation is far from ideal.

I’m sure there are much larger and more important websites being hosted by Squarespace that can’t suffer to be offline for any period. I think the company needs to seriously reevaluate the stability of its platform if it wants to keep growing and sort of take a chunk of the marketplace dominated by Amazon S3. Remember when that suffered an outage back in 2017? Seemingly half the websites I frequent were inaccessible. That was the only time I could remember S3 being out significantly, and if Squarespace wants to play in that arena, the rate it’s been offline lately is not going cut it.

Small-time freelancers who are dependent on their Squarespace-hosted sites to make a living simply can’t afford to have any downtime. And it isn’t like Squarespace is some basic entry-level platform: we’re paying over $200 dollars per year for an account, and I think it’s only fair that we should have 100 percent uptime in return. These are prime content creating and earning hours of a workday, and not being able to access our websites is an intolerable hindrance.

Perhaps Squarespace should spend less money advertising 10% discounts with creators on YouTube (full disclosure: I did use one of the freely available coupon codes for my first year) and instead move some resources towards ensuring complete service uptime. As the cliché goes: I’m not mad, just disappointed.

Happy 2nd anni to me and Squarespace

Yesterday I checked my Mint account to see how much money I don't have, and found out Squarespace have charged the annual fee for this hosting this very site. Because I am a super pro and awesome, I pay for the business tier which costs $216 dollars per year. I don’t exactly sell anything on here, but back when I signed up for Squarespace, the personal tier did not include unlimited pages and galleries, so I was forced to go with business. Maybe I should call and downgrade now that the base tier offers unlimited content hosting as well.

I’m quite happy and proud it’s already been two years since I’ve migrated over to Squarespace, from the combination of tumblr plus Flickr. I think Flickr is still going relatively strongly due to its legion of legacy users stemming from way back when, but tumblr, last I’ve heard, is not doing so well: parent company Verizon have sold it to the owners of Wordpress for essentially peanuts. I’m rather glad I jumped off that sinking ship, though I do still miss the community interactions that tumblr provided; Squarespace is a fairly standard website hosting service, and there isn’t any of the intensive linkage between “sites” like tumblr offers.

Good times, I would say. Instagram killed the tumblr star.

It was slightly out of character for me to switch from a free service to a paying one (and Squarespace wasn’t exactly the cheapest service, either), but I think two years ago I had a strong desire to bring the two separate threads under one slick and modern package. Tumblr wasn’t the best at showing photos at their maximum quality, so hosting full-size photos on Flickr was necessary. The linking back and forth was a bit tiring for the person who had to set it up: me, so to concentrate more on the actual content, the incentive to bring the wordy website and photo repository together at the same spot was strong.

Of course, Squarespace made it super easy to pick a template and get going, though the initial setup process (idiosyncratic to me) was a huge chore because I had to manually add everything from my tumblr and Flickr account. Words, photos, tags, metadata: all had to be entered for each individual content, dating way back to 2011. Tedious, to say the least.

Money is well spent if there’s utility to the thing you bought, so on that vein I shall continue to constantly push out new stuff on here to justify the $18 per month hosting cost. Here’s to many more ramblings, photographs, and stories.

So long, tumblr. Hello, Squarespace.

I should have made the move a long time ago. For a photographer, the website templates tumblr offers are highly limiting due to one factor: resolution. Tumblr downsamples picture uploads to early 2000's Internet levels; it's wonderful for speed when browsing the feed, but on websites it's all a blurry mess. Not sure how I managed to put up with it for so long.

Oh, right; tumblr is free.

Now that I've had steady income for a bit, I figure it's time indeed to switch over to a profession platform that will do justice to my photographs. I've heard of Squarespace for the longest time, with various Youtube personalities offering up their code to get 10% off the first year. After viewing some tutorials, the interface and ease of use really impressed me, and the templates look fantastic as well. At around $216 per year for the business plan - the $144 personal plan has a 20 page limit - it's quite the price pill to swallow for someone graduating from paying nothing. However, with unlimited pages, unlimited hosting, and unlimited bandwidth, it's actually excellent value.

For sure it's going to take some time to transfer all the legacy data from tumblr to this new host. Blog posts have already been done, but photographs will be an entire project. Instead of photo 'feed' or 'stream' I'm going to set up galleries. Due to the low resolution assets in tumblr, I can't simply port them over using Squarespace's built-in application; I have to export out of Lightroom and re-upload everything.

It's should be lots of fun.