> How does a website get full? A website starts off with (for example) 50 megabytes of space for its files. If you have more files, you buy more space. But that costs money. If thousands of people submit photos to a website, it maxes out the storage space very fast. The owner then has to buy more space, which means he has to pay. In this case, there could easily be tens of thousands of photos, and it could become very expensive. There's also the data transfer issue. If you look at pixs on a website, the files have to be sent to you. That's transfer. Normally, you get a (for example) few gigabytes of data transfer per month as part of your account. But if you create a website about dancing kittens or whatever and every secretary in the world sends it to her sister, you'll have millions of visitors and that's a huge amount of data transfer. You pay for that. You can suddenly get a bill for $30,000. In the beginning, there was no limit; if your website suddenly became popular, you paid the bill. Nowadays, there's a limit; when you hit that limit, you can choose to pay for more data transfer or data storage. (Or you can choose not to pay and the website goes off the air for the rest of the month, as the we're-sorry website did.) In this case, the website maxed out and the owners are trying to figure out if they want to pay for the amusement. I once created a webpage that was a bit amusing; it appeared in a bunch of newspapers and magazines, and I was suddenly getting 15,000 visitors per hour. This went on for several days. I had to shut down the images to avoid maxing out the data transfer. I learned my lesson; I don't post pixs of dancing kittens, Paris Hilton, and so on. To give you an idea of numbers: A few years ago, I managed a website at a dotcom. We had 16 million subscribers and over 60 million visits per day. I could post a new page and get 300,000 page views within a few minutes. That was quite useful; I could try things and get very good statistics very quickly. The website was at the bottom of the top 100 websites for traffic. My personal website andreas.com gets on average about 50,000 visitors per month. That's more readership than The Nation and most literary or political magazines. In August, I got some 600,000 page views. Another website of mine gets some 30,000 visits per month, with occassional spikes whenever newspapers write about it every few months. andreas.com is ranked #391,685th (out of some six billion pages). yrs, andreas www.andreas.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html