Sunday, June 18, 2006
Wow
We’ve seldom come anywhere close to going over our bandwidth, which over time has grown to 23 GB per month as Hosting Matters has upped it to coincide with changes in costs and competition for hosting. I don’t really even check to see what it’s been, except incidentally, as today. I want to host a domain for my nephew, and I was comparing space available under elhide versus AV. Elhide has this odd problem where it thinks it is out of disk space. I upload large zip files of pictures, 50 mb or so each, four at a time. Deb’s father downloads them. I delete them. Rinse, repeat. Last time I deleted them, they didn’t release the space, but they are gone. So that account is technically fine, if I have HM support do whatever they have to do to make the disk space counter tally properly, but I also have other stuff going on there that maybe makes me not want to host an extra domain.
So I checked AV and it’s so-so on disk space, but instead of almost no bandwidth, we’re already at 60% for this month, which puts us on target to almost exactly use the whole deal. But… I see that in may we used 27.6 GB out of our 23 GB available! See, there’s a great thing about Hosting Matters. Another hosting company might have been all over us, looking to collect the extra charge.
The sad thing is that the next plan up includes 28 GB, which would have just covered that. We may have to switch. I can keep the bandwidth partly in control by never uploading zips of pictures to AV, which I do sometimes, though there’s only disk space for two at once.
While I was looking at adding a new business domain to elhide’s space, I was also thinking of getting hosting for that elsewhere, adding another basket for my eggs. Without resorting to Verizon, Mindspring and Gmail accounts also available but not really used, if HM goes down to a denial of service attack or other serious problem, I am completely cut off.
I looked at GoDaddy, since I have domains registered there.
They are insanely low cost and make HM look stingy on disk space and bandwidth. However, it seems each e-mail account is limited to 10 MB. Normally that’s fine, but I actually do need the ability to have my e-mail accounts unlimited in size. One, I can be e-mailed some rather large attachments. Two, I download the e-mails in more than one location and leave mail on the server for a specified number of days. It’s a safety mechanism.
Also, I didn’t formally ask, but I found mention online that a hosting account there is for one domain, period. I can add a bunch of domains to any given HM hosting account. Nobody without that is likely to get my business.
Anyway, I’m amazed that our bandwidth has actually gotten that large. In the past few months we have gone from routinely in the 200-something hits a day range per Site Meter (which misses a lot of actual traffic) to 400-something, some days 500-something, which is a big difference. We do have photo-heavy content, whch also matters.
Well. We’ll see what happens. At least I know to watch the meter.