[lit-ideas] Re: Dear world: We're sorry...
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 23:39:18 -0800
> 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
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