Playing around with photo hosting

For awhile now, I have been pondering what I'm going to do about my server infrastructure. Right now, my blog, pictures, and other Internet services are all hosted on a FreeBSD machine running in my apartment. But the hardware is getting creaky, and probably should be upgraded. Even worse, however, is the sorry state of broadband in this country - the best that I have been able to get living in California is 384Kbps upstream. That means that it's rather slow to download large images and such from my server.

So, I have been thinking about moving all of my content to the cloud, and letting other people sweat the low-level details. In theory, it shouldn't be all that expensive, and it would free me up to spend more time creating content.

So, I'll be doing some experiments, starting with my India photos. I signed up for a free MobileMe trial, and it has more than enough space to host my pictures. I started culling the India pictures last night, and got a decent set from Pratima's wedding, which I uploaded to MobileMe. So far, I'm not terribly impressed - I mean, MobileMe is functional, it just doesn't offer a lot of options.

I think that what I really want to use is Flickr, and now that it looks like Microsoft won't be buying Yahoo! after all, I just might give that a shot.

-Andy.