This morning I received a nice e-mail from my website host regarding my transfer limit. It seems that PI has used 85% of the available limit for this month. Did I want to buy more?

WHAT!

After a brief (very brief) moment of pride, I realized that this in no way could be attributed to the popularity of this site. I mean… let’s get real, folks. The other two sites I own, both of which have similar traffic, use a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth.

The difference between PI and the other two sites? A glance at the traffic logs revealed that the number of bandwidth-sucking hits received from spam bots has risen exponentially since this site first came up. Its been ages since there were any spam bots that have managed to write comment or trackback spam, but that hasn’t stopped them from stealing my transfer allocation and leaving me holding the bill. I’ve put in a few new features that will hopefully stop them in their tracks.

My host (Successful Hosting) is in the process of “migrating all accounts to our new, better systems and servers” and thus will not allow me to upgrade or buy more bandwidth at this time. The new accounts come with “one free dedicated IP address.” They don’t have any free right now, but the nice service tech would be happy to move me over right now to a shared account and give me a month free hosting. When I explained that no move would happen until a dedicated IP address was available and asked what I was supposed to do until then,the nice tech was kind enough to double my transfer allocation for free, at least for now.

Having been through the “new, better servers, and don’t worry about sharing your IP address temporarily” bit with a different host, I am now in the market for a “new and better” host for my sites. Suggestions are welcome!