View the MapDown Time 2
Well I’ve finally found out why the site went down and the simple answer is … Digg.com. The site became popular and has (so far) got almost six hundred Diggs. This in itself increased traffic massively to the site, but if I’m being honest shouldn’t have caused the site to be taken down - it was well under the 2000GB a month limit (the most it’s ever got in a day was 1.6GB). The problem was (I think) some of the less efficient code I was using (namely the code providing the comments). As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve removed these scripts and it all seems tickety boo.
In my opionion, some of the comments on Digg were a little unfair towards my hosts. Of course, it’s incredibly frustrating when a site is taken down by a host, but it really isn’t the end of the world. This is not a commercial website, and I’m not going to fork out hundreds of dollars a month to put it on a dedicated server - that really would be overkill. Some might challenge the fact that it isn’t commercial because of the adverts - I’ve added these in an attempt to cover the cost of hosting (and maybe get myself a couple of CDs when the cheque comes through), but really the income generated by the site is peanuts. I’ve gone with my host’s economy package which is less than $3 a month, but provides much more bandwidth and storage than this site requires (now and for the foreseeable future). However, for $3 you don’t expect them to be too pleased when someone is using a lot more than their fair share of the server load. At the moment I am reasonably happy with the hosting, but if I get some more Diggs I might be forced to reconsider. In the meantime I have made some changes to lighten the mapofstrange.com load on the webhostingbuzz servers, which were highlighted in my previous post.