Saving My Bandwidth and My Sanity
After discovering the plan I signed up for with my new web hosting service had a monthly bandwidth cap of 9 GB, and after observing my bandwidth being eaten up rapidly (1 GB in about 30 hours), I started going through steps to make sure I had enough bandwidth for the month.
I sent a message to my provider and they responded with the additional bandwidth costs. The amount for 20 GB is PHP 150.00 (approximately $3.16 in US dollars, depending on the exchange rate) per month. They have lower costs for lower requirements. This is not expensive and I have no problem coming up with that amount since my yearly plan only came out to $46.22 in US dollars (PHP 2200.00). After I received the message, I started making plans to get more bandwidth at the beginning of next week.
Then something in the back of my brain clawed its way forward.
Back on February 23, 2007, Matthew Jabs of eJabs forwarded a link to me from mutube that talked about Apache vs. the Digg Effect. I went back and reread the article today. I knew there was a good reason to choose Linux hosting and this was it. The article explains how to use rewrite rules with your .htaccess file in order to automatically redirect people from high bandwidth consuming referrers to Coral (commonly called Coral Cache) instead of your own pages. I just finished implementing it, except that I could not use the rules from that page for some reason. I ended up using the rules at the bottom of this article. Even though I've taken the high bandwidth users into account, I have some pictures and stuff on my site that eat up a lot of bandwidth. I went in and edited the most recent to pull them from Coral instead. Only time will tell if this is effective or not.
A few days after receiving that message from Matthew, I stumbled onto a link (as I mentioned in my article, How to Reduce Webhosting Costs) to Cucirca.com that talked about a new file hosting service called divShare. I just reread that and checked out divShare again. They host files for bloggers — it's their specialty. I always wondered how Chris at Autofocused.co.uk was able to host the huge pictures he has there (without really checking) and looked today to discover this is the service he's using. If I have problems with Coral, this is the service I'll be using as well.
I have received numerous recommendations to move my blog to another host as soon as I can afford to do so. The problem I had with my former host is a problem that can occur with any host, regardless of how much bandwidth they offer. Some offer a lot of bandwidth but will shut you down when their CPU is overburdened by your website. This happened to Paul at blogpaul recently and he had to scramble to get a better host when they held his multiple websites hostage for an expensive upgrade. Matthew, who sent me the link I mentioned, had just had an issue with his host because his blog was getting too many hits and taxing their CPU. He was shut down for a short period of time as I showed everyone in my article, Too Popular?
I don't know if I'll be moving my blog to another host or not. I really like Philhosting.net and not just because they're only two hours away from me. Of course, that would make it easy for me to go and stand on someone's desk (as I have been known to do) in order to get the service I need when I need it, but I don't think it will ever come to that. They have been nothing short of helpful. Bandwidth costs them much more than the providers in the US and that's the sole reason they don't provide more by default.
I'll let you know when and if I decide to move my blog again. Until then, it's business as usual.
FIXED: I had to put these different rewrite rules above the WordPress rules:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)coral-no-serve$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?digg\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?reddit\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?slashdot\.org [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?slashdot\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)?$ http://www.untwistedvortex.com.nyud.net:8080/$1 [R,L]
Similar Posts:
Interesting stuff RT, and nothing's ever simple eh?
Divshare's been pretty good so far – fast servers and they even have a Wordpress plugin to upload your images direct from your WP 'write post' page.
Chris…
How do you do it at Autofocused.co.uk? Do you use the rewrite rule in the .htaccess file?
I'm sure you can help RT…good luck, let me know if there is anything I can do. It sure is nice to have your blog loading up faster now if nothing else!
Wow! How did you clock up 1GB in 30hrs? That would have been a terror for me, as I'm mainly using images to express myself.
Part of it was FTPing the whole site and database over — then having to resend some because of PHP5. I'm sure it was like a third of it.
Sorry Matthew, being completely thick here: How do I do what?
Chris, I think he thought that you had to use htaccess rules to use divShare. It's not the same thing. Electron slap for Matt.
How do you redirect your bandwidth for you images at Autofocused.co.uk?
…or am I way off base here? lol.
guess I was off…lol
Oh well, I'll keep my mouth shut…nah…NEVER!!
Why start now?
Yeah, it's effectively hotlinking from their site.
Which is nice.
RT…Well, I think I understood about a quarter of this, if that much. Way too deep for me, but all of us can't be guru's like you.
Thanks for answering my question about the free sites. There are differences for those of us that don't know much about them, so I understand where you are coming from.
You really are a geek if you figured all that out on your own.
If you skimmed it from somewhere on the Internet…that makes me think you're a little less of a comic book geek & a little more normal!
RT…are you a cyborg? A blogging cyborg???? That's it isn't it??!!
lol
Matt, I've been doing the Internet thing for at least 12 years. I've probably forgotten more than I'll ever learn again. That's how I moved up to the manager of the MIS/IT department at a telemarketing company in 2000. No degree, no certificate, but buttloads of knowledge. Cyborg? Hardly. Super cyborg is more like it.
The secret at getting stuff working right on a blog or any website is not what you know. It's what resources you can use. That's all I do — use available resources.