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]