Does Size Really Matter?

I signed up for a fairly simple webhosting contract about 6 months ago with 1and1.com and happily they have steadily increased the webspace and bandwidth of my package since then. As I’m still in the stumble and recover stage when it comes to actually setting up and maintaining a website, maybe I’m easily impressed.

For $10/month I get 3 domain names, 2GB of webspace, 50GB of traffic, 200 e-mail accounts with 1GB storage each, a free copy of NetObjects Fusion to design my sites, and lots of other stuff I don’t understand yet. Seems like a killer deal to me.

What’s interesting is that they just upped the storage space for e-mail boxes to 1Gb each – previously it was 50Mb. Personally, it doesn’t really matter to me since I use Outlook and empty it out pretty much every day anyway. The only time it might become an issue is when I’m traveling and use their WebMail service to check my messages, leaving everything on their server till I get home. Even then, I probably wouldn’t have gone over the 50Mb limit. But maybe now that people are using their digital cameras more, and people are e-mailing huge Powerpoint presentations and such, maybe the 1Gb mailbox will be the new standard, at least for a while.

But just having all that storage space going unused makes me nervous. What could I do with it? Is there some way I can utilize that “free” space? I suppose I could set up semi-permanent storage e-mail boxes for backup purposes, or set up what would amount to a drop box for friends and family to go check when they wanted. Hey, I could charge people big bucks to rent my drop boxes for espionage purposes!!

I hope Mr. Ridge isn’t reading this blog. Erase. Erase.