I’ve held steady under 1 Gig of bandwidth since launching a year and a half back (under 100 Meg initially, in fact). Because there is so little traffic here, I’ve been able to get by with some low price hosting ever since launching. In the past 3-4 months, however, traffic has exploded on the site, jumping from less than 50 visitors a day in November and December last year to several hundred visits plus 1500-2000 RSS hits per day in the past few weeks. Just how much a jump counts as an explosion in my view? Well, here’s traffic stats by month from the beginning of the year:
And let me point out that the bandwidth counter is missing some traffic, as I received a warning Sunday night for passing 80% of my cap (10 Gig per month). Total traffic on my site is as follows:
I’ve looked carefully at my traffic logs and found over 5% of my total bandwidth has gone to visitors from Google looking for this picture of awesome hotness:
The reason that image caused so much trouble is the Google search result points to the November 2006 archive on which the image appears. That archive also included (until I removed it) a 1 meg animated Superman GIF. That gif caused all my bandwidth problems, accounting for just over 20% of my traffic this month. I’ve cut daily traffic from 650+Meg in the past week to around 175 Meg yesterday and a current traffic rate today to be roughly the same. I’ll be cutting it close on bandwidth over the next few days, however, so if the site is down for a day or two, know that it is because of hitting my bandwidth cap. This will be reset on May 1, and with the Superman GIF removed, I shouldn’t have problems any time soon. And if I can figure out how to get the animated GIF back without killing my bandwidth, I’ll put it up again and post a note that it is back.
[tags]My recent traffic activity[/tags]