About two months ago I started to play chess again. I'm an absolute beginner, knowing some basic tricks and eventually able to win a game (although not too often), but it's nice. I noticed that in real life I started to think more in terms of pros and cons, just like I do while pondering about a move.

To practice this, I used to go to ChessHere.com. It's a correspondence chess site, where two players don't have to be online at the same time and should make a move within a certain time interval, say 3 days. It's quite a complete site and you can sign up for free. Of course you can become a premium member to gain some more extras, but the free accounts are quite complete.
But about a month ago something went horribly wrong with the site. A part of their database got wiped out and I lost all the games I had played recently. Everything was put back to the state I was in a year ago. And guess what? No backups of the database. That's what I call a major screw up.
So being a bit angry about this I started to look for other sites. Many sites didn't have a too good first impression and didn't really appeal me to get started with.

I tried one alternative site: ChessWorld (or also known as LetsPlayChess.com). I joined as a guest and played one game. The site has a large user base and is quite feature rich, the menus are quite packed. However, almost every feature requires you to become full member, handy things I got used to at ChessHere.com for free. You couldn't even export your game to the PGN format. In order to get a complete chess experience I had to pay over 20 euros for a year. Quite much for a site I basically don't know. If I could pay per month I had seriously considered it.

So while feeling limited in my freedom at ChessWorld.net I decided to give ChessHere.com another try, hoping that they learned from their horrible mistake and that it won't happen again. The site has renewed a little since the collapse, but session management appears to be a bit broken. But these are little problems which don't put down the whole chess experience.