My Bandwidth Usage Is Higher Than I Expected

My new host has a bandwidth cap of 9 GB per month for the plan I selected. When I signed up, I didn't realize I need three times that amount.

I don't think I have an immensely popular blog, but traffic numbers don't lie. According to Alexa, my blog was ranked at 93,607 yesterday even with 12 hours of downtime from the move. The 5 hours of downtime from my previous host didn't seem to affect the numbers very much either.

I may be overestimating bandwidth usage, but my cPanel shows me right now at 752.50 MB of usage (updating every 6 hours) since the first page was shown (before I could even access it). Maybe 30 hours per gigabyte might be more in line with what I'm using, but I can't be sure.

Why am I telling you all this? I don't want to use a third-party image hosting service (I don't show images that often), but I still have to cover the cost of additional bandwidth. I just signed up with PayPerPost, but I won't be doing anything with them until my PayPal account is verified with my bank. The Google AdSense isn't going to do it alone. In fact, my AdSense format will change as soon as I do my first PayPerPost posting. The latest change that Google made to the ads has made them more obtrusive and annoying. It's no wonder that most bloggers are reporting reduced revenue.

I'm sending an email message in the morning to ask how much the additional bandwidth will cost me. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping it isn't very much compared to the plan itself.

Update: I'm routing some of the images through Coral Cache to reduce the bandwidth usage a bit.

April 18th, 2007 By RT Cunningham | Categories: Internet | Tags: services, sponsored posts |

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Homemom3 on April 19th, 2007 at 1:51 am (Reply)

Wanted to thank you for stopping by my blog and I also favorited you. Love the template design, reminds me of the one momgadget has on her site. If you are ever looking for more ways to earn money blogging (writing ads) I have a whole slew of them. Just yell at me.

Comedy Plus on April 19th, 2007 at 3:37 am (Reply)

RT, wow you'll have to give us updates on this. I do lots of pictures, but my blog is free. Is there a reason why you don't use a free one? Remember, I am not very up on all this technogeek stuff. Wish I was, but…

Claire on April 19th, 2007 at 7:16 am (Reply)

Hey RT , i would also recommend sponsored review as well as pay per post.
Lucky you for having such a great Alexa score!

RT Cunningham on April 19th, 2007 at 12:23 pm (Reply)

Comedy, it's hard to explain. Free services are too limited for what I do.

Thanks, Claire, but I'm not trying to make it better. It's happening by itself.

James on April 19th, 2007 at 1:51 pm (Reply)

Ouchies.

9GB is kinda, not much at all. I hope it's really really cheap for that amount of bandwidth. Siteground gives 2.5TB of bandwidth for $6/month.

Hate to say it, but get that PayPal thing going and switch hosts again, assuming you're not tied into a contract. Good to see you're working on ways to keep it going though.

coach on April 19th, 2007 at 4:48 pm (Reply)

I get really confused by the different reports I read online about hosting. One thing in particular is the hosts that charge next to nothing for a lot of bandwidth but then pull the plug when CPU usage on the server goes too high. I wonder if siteground does the same?

RT do you mind sharing who you have gone with now? I am looking for a host for a new site.

RT Cunningham on April 19th, 2007 at 4:53 pm (Reply)

I'm getting ready to write an article on it. Getting my sources together now.

James on April 19th, 2007 at 5:06 pm (Reply)

I can't honestly say on the CPU usage thing. I don't see my blog ever getting to the point where it will become an issue. Siteground was the cheapest I ran across, with the most storage and lots of bandwidth and made it a point to make sure that they were dedicated to supporting Wordpress software.

I couldn't really pass it up based on the selling points, and they've turned out to be great hosts with maybe a minute or 2 of downtime in 2 weeks, and fast turnaround on the lone issue I had with CPanel (5 minutes to fix from submission of ticket in the middle of the night).

Anyway, that's my testimonial~ RT's site has been alot faster since he swapped, so I'm sure he's happy with that aspect.