The problem with “free”

For a month or 2 (OK, maybe more – my sense of time is hazy when I’ve been procrastinating hard) I’ve been the proud owner of a free .co.cc domain name and free 000webhost.com hosting.  I haven’t made any good use of it, but it’s sucked up a fair amount of my time: checking to see if the registration had been activated, requesting activation, waiting, checking to see if the nameservers had been updated yet, waiting, twitching, reading the support resources, visiting the non-existent site to will it into being with my steely gaze, emailing support and waiting a week for a reply.

All I wanted it for was to poke around: instal WordPress.org, play with themes and stuff, test things I wasn’t sure about before I did them anywhere important. I didn’t see any point paying for something I was only going to use for fun and exploration. D’oh.

Top quality fun and exploration are well worth paying for.  I wouldn’t say “oh, I’ll only ever use free sex toys because they’re just for fun,” or decide that my walking shoes have to be free because I’ll only use them to explore. So why was I focused on getting my test on for free?

Because the internet’s sposed to be free, yo.

No.

In the end I got pissed off and paid about £20 of our quaint English pounds to some guys online in exchange for a year’s hosting package that’s probably a lot higher-spec than I need, and includes a free .com domain name registration.  I didn’t compare web hosting prices and find the best deal, I didn’t ask all my self-hosting friends for recommendations. Shit, I didn’t even tweet for help.

I just got bored bored bored of the dicking around with this free stuff and decided I was happy to pay someone who would do it a little bit faster and better; then I paid the first people I googled who looked… faster and better. And they were.  I still had to live chat with a techie about getting my domain registration arranged, but that was quick and painless and live, dammit, so I wasn’t left frustrated and grouchy.

Oh, my aching internet-addicted bones.

I’m not saying all free stuff is bad; I have some excellent free or “freemium” stuff that I’m very happy with and whose support service is actually quite supportive.  But I don’t want to embrace the false economy of saving money by doing everything myself, when my time is worth more than the fee for assistance.

So this morning I looked at my situation and grokked this: I could spend a few hours messing with my new setup and export-importing all my content and adding plugins and dancing with widgets.  Or I could spend some cash and have my new site set up for me.  I’d been intending to do it all myself, to benefit from the learning implicit in any new activity.  But I realised the knowledge to be gained is largely “how to point and click”, and I’m pretty sure I could pick it up whenever if I needed to.  So again, I’d rather spend a little cash and save the hassle than spend the time (when I could be earning money or chilling with my family) to do it myself.

Problem solved through the application of cash.  So if you have cash, great – your takeaway is to spend more of it on saving yourself for the good stuff.  If you don’t have cash, that sucks and I’m on my way.  Leave me a comment (or email me) about who you are and what you’re doing for money; I’ll get back to you and help if I can.

Image credit: Gisela Giardino