On Wednesday, my readership started to increase from 20-40 hits per day to over 150 hits. I was starting to approach 1000 total hits and was pretty excited about that, when on Thursday I received almost 2000 hits. Right now, (a little past 2:30pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time) I have received almost 6000 hits for Friday.
Yesterday, with less than 2000 hits I exceeded by bandwidth traffic limitations for the MONTH. Thursday's transfers were in excess of 1 GB. I immediately upgraded the service from doteasy.com's free service to the highest tiered pay service, but that only gives me 20 GB per month. So, I'm in a bit of a pickle. I'm guessing the 20 GB will last only through the weekend.
Related Articles
As a warning this website might go down, but I'll do everything I can to keep it up and running.
I'm also thinking about putting up a paypal donation thing, but that isn't going to help unless I can find a host that will be able to allow enough monthly traffic for the website to survive.
You can post comments here or e-mail me at cooking@cookingforengineers.com.
Related Articles
...and not that I'd like to see the site down, but it already deserves being slashdotted :) Keep up the great job! I'd like to see some curry-powered recipe, if you could... thanks!
Perhaps rethinking your adsense placement too?
Move your Feed to FeedBurner?
Definitely move the CSS to an external file.
Good luck,
Your home page includes HTML: 77,914 bytes of html and 489,365 in images. Among other things, every time someone comes to your home page they are trying to get 500K+. Over dialup, still a huge part of the Internet, that's about two minutes just to load.
Things you can do right now:
1. Cut the number of posts on your home page. From 10 to 5 could save as much as a third of the current bandwidth.
2. Cut the payload of the photos. Tighter cropping. Smaller scaling. And harsher jpeg compression. Without resizing, I was able to cut nearly half of the size of the photos without a perceived loss of image quality.
I don't know how much of your traffic is coming from Atom/RSS but there are a few tweaks of the web server that tell most newsreaders to take the latest file only if it's been updated. This can cut that traffic by an order of magnitude.
btw, you're probably ready for a deal with FoodTV, by the way. Your blog is half Alton Brown and half America's Test Kitchen.
http://www.8-95.com/
powweb.com offers 5GB/day for less than $8/month (yes, you read that correctly. I just started using them for my blog, and to host image files that get too many hits to put elsewhere.
Itchy
Move the CSS to another file.
You've got a lot of comments in your HTML and a lot of double and triple spaces which do nothing... (1200 extra spaces every time someone hits your home page, and probably as many comments and a bunch of extra return characters [surrounded by spaces])
Your atom file is 26,000 bytes alone, who knows how often people refresh that. To get a good feel, just turn it off for an hour and see how your bandwidth changes.
Another consideration is storing your images (or feeds) on another server. This would prevent you from moving servers and if you use all the bandwidth up that site, at least your main site stays up. Technically there probably isn't anything stopping you from putting your CSS file somewhere else, the web client sure wouldn't care...
Good Luck,
Gary
http://www.free-webhosts.com/search-webhosts.php?ADV=0010000000000000000000000100000000000000100
It's a list of free webspace providers, ones that don't force ads and have FTP so blogger still works. And the important thing: Unlimited bandwidth.
-Bave fun.
Keep that in mind before you make any big decisions and waste a lot of money. :)
Drop us a line, we look forward to hearing from you.
- IrthNet proprietor, support@irth.net
I then found TotalChoice Hosting (totalchoicehosting.com) which has outstanding support and also good prices - for $4/month (or $44/year, if you pay yearly 1 month free) you get 10Gb of monthly traffic, 250Mb of disk space and unlimited e-mail and FTP accounts, unlimited databases, aliases, forwarders, spamassassin, etc, etc.
Give them a try, if you don't like the service, you'll get a full refund if you cancel within 30 days.
But don't just take my word for it. Visit their family forums (http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/index.php) and see what findmyhosting.com has to say about them (http://www.findmyhosting.com/listallplans.asp?host=5330).
It's about 20-30 dollars to get started and 1.45 dollars a month.
You get PHP, ASP, MYSQL Unlimited number of pop3-mail accounts and much more.
Where do you get all your recipes' recipeland.com ? I was thinking if you needed a little site revenue to keep the site afloat why not have all your visitors click on half a dozen google ads on the edge of your board. They do generate income for you, right? NetProHosting.com looked real promising from another poster. That cookbook idea would be simple enough to do, and why don't you sell it with an opt in recipes' of the month membership where you send out a dozen new recipes each month to those that order it? Sorry to cram this all in a run-on sentence but doesn't that save space? =*) AZMIke