Bandwidth Uppage

Hi kids!

Since you've all been good lately, I'm doubling your allowance!

Nearly every month there are a couple of Munuvians who hit the bandwidth limit and see their sites temporarily go offline.

To explain: Each blog has a certain bandwidth allowance, and if you go over that, the server suspends your site automatically. This isn't a fixed limit, though, but rather a safety feature so that if someone, say, hotlinks an image from your site, they don't chew up all the bandwidth of the server and cost us hundreds of dollars in excess usage.

At our previous service provider, we got, I think, 1.5TB of bandwidth per month per server, and then it was 50 cents per GB after that. The servers cost around $150 each, so it worked out to about 10 cents per GB for the first 1.5TB, and then it suddenly got expensive.

At our current provider, we get 2TB per month for servers costing about $200. After that, it was 25 cents per GB - a lot better, but still more expensive than the packaged bandwidth.

This week they reduced their excess usage charges to 10 cents per GB, so now it works out the same as the pre-paid bandwidth, so there's no longer any big problem. Last October, a 1TB overrun would have cost $500; now it's just $100.

What this means is that I can go through and double everyone's bandwidth allowance. :)

There's a couple of hundred accounts to adjust, though, so it might take a couple of days. But since we're in a new month, no-one's likely to run out for a little while... I hope. ;)