From Boing Boing :
Update to the TA Community insiders: Due to the complicated nature of the planned upcoming move to a private paid members only community, changes will not be formally announced until sometime in August. Current ‘free sites’ will be suspended starting July 1 with a planned deletion scheduled for the fall 2006. DO NOT QUESTION me about these changes as NOTHING will be said in advance of the official notices. THANK YOU for your consideration in this regard. From *Janet on June 8, 2006 2:30am
This is indeed their rights, but it’s not a nice thing to do. BB seems to agree with me on this as well.
TA.com may said that they’re having problems footing the bill for the heavy-users, but the average Joe User is not aware at all – and suddenly they got the kick.
For this unaware (and light users), TA should at least offer a cheaper subscription, or help them migrate to other moblog site (option like “download all photos as a single ZIP file” would be really nice). But no, TA.com treated everyone the same.
So I’ve had enough – I’ve setup my own gallery, and moved my photos there.
I had to left a lot more photos at TA.com due to lack of time to move them to this new one, so yes, I’m still bitter.
Got myself an account @ Dreamhost.com for about the same price of TA.com’s subscription fee; and a whole lot more – hosting facility for my blogs, websites, emails, mailing lists, loads of space which gets bigger every week (yes you read it right), and so on. A much better deal indeed.
But what’s more important is the fact that Dreamhost is probably the biggest webhoster in USA, and you can bet that they have the resources to give you the best & reliable service. My own experience is that usually I found out about a problem from their status website – not by experiencing the problem myself. This is a very nice change.
If you want to sign-up to Dreamhost, just click here.
I’ve also got a special promotion deal with them, so if you enter HSS8888 as the promo code when you sign up, then you can get discount up to US$ 50. Making it actually a cheaper deal than TA.com.
What if you want a freebie moblog service ?
Well there are quite a few, but you need to keep in mind that they can turn back against you at anytime just like TA.com. That said, the folks at Moblog.co.uk promised that they won’t do that, and if you need help to move your photos from TA.com, you can give this software a try.
Am I nice or what ?
OK I’ve wasted enough time because of this, so gotta go back to work. Hope this helps a few of you out there.