Hey, folks. As most of you know, “Alas” briefly went down a couple of days ago, when we exceeded the 35 gigabyte bandwidth limit for the month. I bought three extra GBs, which I thought would do the trick, but it took them a day to process the order, and in the meanwhile “Alas” was offline for a while.
Unfortunately, the same thing is probably about to happen again – it turns out 3 extra GBs probably wasn’t enough. Our bandwidth for June is currently 37880.14 Megabytes, and when it hits 38,000 “Alas” will presumably be shut off again. I contacted the host hours ago, asking to buy more GBs for June, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. By the time they do bother getting back to me, “Alas” will probably have been turned off. Again.
Color me annoyed.
Most likely, Alas is about to go down, and it won’t reappear until Friday morning (the start of July). Sorry about that. I’m taking steps to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
By the way, MAJOR THANK YOUs to everyone who has used the “give us money” link on the sidebar to contribute money to “Alas.” There has already been enough contributed to let me pay the WordPress expert who’ll be moving the huge “Alas” database. And if contributions keep coming in it’ll also pay for the site’s bandwidth for the forseeable future. You folks rock.
Who the heck is your hosting service?
If it’s not Dreamhost, move.
Yup, I’m moving to Dreamhost – that’s exactly what I meant by “I’m taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” :-)
I’m glad to hear that our efforts have smoothed the transition– it sounds like you’re quite ready for a new, better host. You’re one of my first reads in the morning, so I’m glad that a stable July is on the horizon.
How much transfer amount are you going to get with Dreamhost?
Some friends and I rent a server from ServerBeach. We get 2 terrabytes of transfer per month for 90$. ‘Course, you gotta administer your own server, and that’s not exactly something for everyone!
Good luck with the move, hope it all goes smoothly!
I loved Dreamhost … until I had database-driven websites like my current one. Then everything slowed to molasses, with MySQL crashes 2-3 times a week (which do not show on their server statistics). I moved two months ago. I’m not here to trash Dreamhost, but just to say caveat emptor.
Money sent. Good luck with the transfer.
media girl, what databases? I’m looking at upgrading my blog software.
You folks rock.
No it’s this site that rocks and I’m delighted to be able to do something to thank you for creating a place that provides such intelligent and challenging discussions.
How much to blogads cost anyway? I can think of a few people with products that might do well with some marketing.
Depends on the site, Josh. It’s a pretty wide range, from $10 or so for a month on a small site to thousands of dollars on Kos or Instapundit. Blog ads are nice because you can often target your impressions; if you’re selling “Bush Dynasty Forever” t-shirts, then DailyKos is probably not the right market.
Another alternative is per-impression ads on major sites; you can get 10k impressions on a site like Blogger News Network (cough) for $1. This can be a better option for products with non-niche appeal. Act now, and beat the rush. ;)
Media Girl, I chose Dreamhost because it gives plenty of bandwidth for ten bucks a month, and because it’s recommended on the WordPress site (which I presume means that it’s worked acceptably for other WordPress users). Now I’m worried, because WordPress uses MSQL, of course.
So was it a blog that you had trouble with on Dreamhost, or something more complex? It’s not too late for me to change my mind, if Dreamhost is going to be a disaster.