Bandwidth is no longer a problem

So that’s the blog back up and running then.

Turns out, this lowly little blog with 16 subscribers is using over 1Gb data transfer a month.

Gosh.

The hosting package I put this site on 3 years ago has a limit of 1Gb a month. Once I hit that limit, the site was suspended (or something broke on their end, I’m not too sure). I’ve now moved to GoDaddy for a while, which gives me a whopping 300Gb a month quota.

No, that’s not a typo. 300Gb. And that’s the economy plan, too.

But what surprises me is just how easy it is to use up 1Gb in a month. There’s not much on this site, and there’s really very little proper traffic. The vast majority of the bandwidth was being used up by spiders for search engines. I did some work to support 304 conditional gets, which bought me some time, but the site was being crawled every day and it soon adds up – 1Gb in a month comes down to about 30-odd Mb a day. Spread that amongst about 10 different spiders (of varying degrees of niceness) and (shock-horror) some actual real people browsing, and it soon goes.

That’s progress for you.