Breaking the 100 Gig Barrier

I’m not sure how many of you saw it, but my site was down for a while. Sometime late last night, I noticed that I couldn’t hit avoision.com or 3years3minutes.com. Logging into my CP, I soon saw why.

Man – the last time my site went down due to traffic was back in January of 2005, when I got linked by Netscape. As a result of that, I ended up buying additional bandwidth in 10 gig chunks. After doing that a few times, it suddenly became more cost effective for me to upgrade my hosting plan.

Ever since then, bandwidth hasn’t been much of a problem. My new cap was 100 gigs per month, which was double what I had previously when my site buckled. 100 gigs is a LOT of data, so I figured I’d be safe.

Things held up for me, even when I was sort-of mentioned by BoingBoing and linked by ebaumsworld. I got a ton of folks stopping by, but the site held up. That month, I did about 70 gigs’ worth, which was the most traffic I’ve ever had in any one given month.

On average, I think my blog does something in the neighborhood of 6 – 11 gigs of traffic per month. It’s not like there are a ton of folks who read this thing, so I wasn’t too worried about hitting my cap. With the addition of 3 Years 3 Minutes, that’s added more to my monthly bandwidth (last month, that site used about 30 gigs alone).

Ever since Pi Day, my pi10k experiment has been really making the rounds. It’s been neat watching over the referrer logs, and seeing domains like .nl and .be and .ru pop up. All the traffic to *that* particular page, coupled with the recent Metafilter link put me over the top, it seems.

Today, I worked with my host and, instead of upgrading… bought into a “bandwidth free” package, that pretty much removes any bandwidth limitations on my sites. Which is cool. Looking at my CP now, I’ve done about 103 gigs so far this month, with about a week left to go.

Now, since I no longer need to worry about forking over cash to cover bandwidth costs, I’m looking forward to seeing just how high this number will go. Not too shabby for one blog and one movie. :)