Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Bandwidth Exceeded

Today I got a message that the site I am having so much trouble with at MongoHosting has exceeded its bandwidth. It's completely shut down!

So, I access the control panel and begin really researching what's been going on. Normally, the bandwidth usage is 60 or 70 Meg. But over the past few months it has been climbing until it topped out at over 500 Meg. Now I know for a fact that the people I know who visit the site have not increased their activity eight times.

The key was the bulletin board. I set up a bulletin board hoping that we could migrate away from the YahooGroup we have been using. The bulletin board had only 4 members, two of which were me, and there was hardly any messages. Just a few welcoms from me and a question or two.

Yet the web logs show that 80% of the all the traffic that comes through the domain is to the bulletin board. I can only conclude that bots are attempting to farm the board for e-mail addresses to SPAM or back doors so that they can break in an SPAM the board itself.

But here's the real kick in the head. According to the MongoHosting website, what I'm paying should get me 5 Gig of bandwidth. I shouldn't be topping out at just 500 Meg. Did they lower my bandwidth allocation? I hadn't been paying attention so I didn't notice. Honestly, I don't think they did but I have no way of finding out because, as my experience with the domain name extortion has shown me, their admin only seems to work on Saturdays.

So, my website is down until at least then.

The English language does not have curse words sufficient to express my frustration at this whole situation and I have resorted to simply
screaming inarticulately.

One of the things I'm considering is buying another domain, probably the .net version of the .org I already have, and setting up hosting with someone reputable. On the other hand, all the search engines are pointing to the original site and by the time they start re-directing people to the new location I will have solved this issue.

[Insert more screaming here!]

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