To .mac or not to .mac

[Mike]

I am currently in a quandary trying to decide if I should get a .mac account. It has lots of interesting features for mac owners - the instant website publishing to my account would be good but it is doubling up on my current web hosting package (though I can just point the domain name there if I want to. . . )

Doubling the webhosting from £50 to £120 a year does seem a bit excessive though.

Here are the .mac features I can sign up for a 60 day free trial if I want to try it I suppose.

[mr_e]

That's a substantial amount of bandwidth they've got on offer there. How does it compare to your current hosting provider?

[Mike]

I have over 400,000gb of hosting space and 2,500gb of bandwidth (we have used about 1gb so far this month!) - yes they are overselling like hell! The silly thing is I can't get a sensible amount of storage on other providers it is either £50 for the oversold or £50 for the piddely nothing. To be honest the .mac is about the right value for the statistic (and extras) but the already hosting three websites is putting me off. I could not move all the domains to the .mac because it does not allow me to host databases. . .

The .mac does more thinks automatically, such as syncing my preferences over several computers, allowing me to control my mac from another machine, improved web galleries for photos, auto publishing directly from iphoto, iweb and others and seamless integration with mail and other mac programs.

I think that a free trial will help but I just don't want to get sucked in.

[mr_e]

It's a shame I don't run a site as well, then you could just buy the .mac account and I could lend you the database space, assuming you could have the forums link to a database on another server. So... it comes down to whether or not you want to pay £50 extra for greater ease of content management, really.

[Mike]

Well that is true - it does also help with the whole syncing between work and home. . . . but it that really important enough to spend £70 on? I don't think it is.

Oh, I have a trial .mac account at the moment, it does not give me sufficient space to properly try out the webhosting side and has crashed iweb the two times I have tried to publish a page to the service. First impressions are poor to be honest.

[johnriley1uk]

Change for the sake of change? Your web site and forum are looking very good indeed, so why not concentrate instead on further content development rather than technology development?

Just a thought.

[Mike]

Content and technology go hand in hand. It allows the content to be displayed in a better format. The RSS feed should show that there are three new web galleries today! I hope it works okay

I am looking into the hosting tech support to see if there is something I need to activate on the server to allow it to work better. I don't want to change for the sake of it, on the other hand it if makes my life easier to publish content then it is a win win. I have 59 days remaining of the free trial so I will see how it goes.

[johnriley1uk]

Talking of technology, will it cause any problems on Saturday that all the TIFF files I will be bringing over will be encoded for PC?

[stimpsonslostson]

we have a .mac account- we got it with our imac. The genius told us it was one of the best things apple do for their users. We've barely used it (and won't be renewing). Tho that could just me my technical ineptitude talking!
I can see why it's a great idea, but we just don't use the net that much, so there's little point us paying for it. (I just hope our .mac email address keeps going! I think it does...)
p

[Mike]

I just hope our .mac email address keeps going! I think it does...)

I am afraid not. . . . it will end with the subscription.

Talking of technology, will it cause any problems on Saturday that all the TIFF files I will be bringing over will be encoded for PC?

Email me an image now (not a 50mb file though!) and I will try it at home later. I don't think it will but you never know. Personally I think that it might be an idea to make sure that all the tiff's are encoded to mac and pc before the event. It should not be too difficult for people to do that and submit a new cd with them all on.

Actually you could upload it to johnriley1uk.org ftp server and I can find it there.