Cav's Place

There was a time, when elections were looming, when I had to rush so I wouldn’t end up needing to post something during the last two or three days of the month in order to stick to my rule of posting on at least two separate days each week, because the server the blog is on was exhausting its allotted monthly bandwidth early due to the high traffic generated by the blogs of some politicians, also hosted on it. But it’s been quite some time since that last happened, so I was no longer worried about it. Yet this month the bandwidth limit was exceeded over a week early, and it’s no longer the server that’s to blame.
As you may know, Jen was kind enough to host my blog on her site, so the bandwidth allocation is for the entire site, not just for my blog. I believe early on the limit was 5 Gb per month, which was just manageable, with my blog’s part being completely negligible. Then the allottment increased to 10 Gb per month and, despite a total of five blogs being hosted on this account, the amount used was only about 6 Gb per month, so it was never a question of hitting the limit. My part of it increased drastically once I posted that beginner’s resource guide for Perfect World International, averaging some 500 Mb per month ever since.
Yet Jen started using her personal blog less and less, eventually abandoning it around the end of 2009, which pretty much halved the monthly bandwidth usage, making it appear quite impossible to ever have such problems. But here we are today, with the limit actually exceeded for the first time ever, and so far from the end of the month too. I would be feeling guilty for my part of it if this would have happened just before the end of the month, seeing as my blog’s not really supposed to be there in the first place, but the total bandwidth used by me during the first 22 days of the month equals the amount used by the most active part of the site in about a day and a half, so removing me completely would have merely delayed this outcome until tomorrow evening.

Still, seeing as, for reasons as yet unknown, Jen’s been ignoring me completely for some time, I was starting to very seriously consider looking for hosting offers and talking to dad about paying for one in order to move to my own site. I mean, it would make sense for her to withdraw the friendly offer of hosting my blog now that she apparently no longer wants to have anything to do with me, so I didn’t want to be caught with my pants down when that happened. And dad found my blog some time ago as well, so hiding it is no longer an issue, though apparently the fact that it’s written in English was thankfully enough of a deterrent for him after a short while.
But I didn’t want to bring it up this month, still hoping to figure out what exactly made her stop talking to me and preferably also solve that problem, as that’s the most important part of this. If things didn’t improve, I was thinking about bringing it up in August, possibly even in the second half of August, and probably move in late September or early October if it worked out all right. But if this high traffic trend continues I’ll likely need to bring it up sooner and possibly even make the switch before it’ll happen again towards the end of August.

Since the site will likely be blocked for the rest of the month, there can be no further developments there, so I’ll need to wait until August to figure out whether the bandwidth issues require me to make the switch sooner anyway. But this did light a fire under my existing concerns regarding this issue, so I’ll be actively looking for options. I certainly don’t need much in terms of space and monthly bandwidth, so I’ll be looking at the cheapest offers from that point of view, but excellent reliability and proper management tools are a must, as there’s no point in paying for something unless it’d be better than what you could get for free, and I had a pretty good thing for free for quite some time now. As for the domain name, unfortunately the one I’ve been thinking about eventually getting for the past 11 or 12 years has been taken some years ago, but I have two more options, one of them being to simply change the TLD I had in mind for the original name, assuming the company that now owns the one I had my eyes on won’t have any problems with that.
Until then, I’ll be making use of the LiveJournal account I made to be able to follow Ami‘s posts, so I’ll stick to my plan of posting on at least two different days each week, then move the posts once I’ll regain access, preserving the original time and date of posting, deleting them from there at the same time.

In other news, I have actually managed to start working on that other plan of mine on Monday and so far stuck to it well enough. It’s not much, but something’s better than nothing in that case, so I’m quite satisfied with it. The quality of the results seems really bad to me, but then again how often do I think anything else about anything I do? That’s the real challenge, in fact. I need to somehow just ignore the quality, or my opinion of it, and do something, because otherwise I’ll keep saying it can’t be good enough and never get anything done.
That’s how it is with this blog as well: Just struggling to put something out there every week despite being thoroughly embarrassed with the quality of nearly every single post… Yet I have managed to keep it up for over three years already, so maybe I’ll manage something similar with other things as well. Or maybe not, because that’s much greater and more difficult than a blog…

Edit: Something strange is going on…