I came into work on Monday morning, and I had an email waiting for me from my web hosting company. It read:
Please be advised that your account, andymorales.com, is approaching one or more resource allotments. Details are provided below…In the last 30 days, your account used 73GB of 75GB. If, on 02/26/2010, your rolling 30-day bandwidth total exceeds your bandwidth allotment, you will be automatically billed $12.00 for every 1GB over your allotment.
I was caught off guard. My website, though it is very robust, does not take up a lot of space on my server. I also don’t have many items on my site that could be downloaded or that could cause that much traffic. So I examined my stats, and it appeared that I was getting slammed.
I first looked up the stats from the previous day, January 31, 2010.
Mixture of stats from January 31, 2010
85 Thousand Times!
The first thing I noticed was the amount of KB’s transferred. That is a ton! Other stats that I found interesting were that the majority of people were using the outdated and troubled IE6 browser. I clicked on the link in the stats for the top two referring sites, to only get blocked at work by Websense, for “mp3 file sharing.” And then I saw what was being transferred–Jay-Z. Now its a great song so I certainly don’t blame them, but cmon, almost 5 thousand downloads in the one day! Why is China, chinese search engines and file sharing sites locking on to me and a song that I had on my site.
I then reviewed my stats for the past month, and not just the one day. The Jay-Z song was downloaded 85 thousand times.
Every fews months I put on my home page 3 songs that I have been listening to often. It is a way to share both my musical tastes with people, but also an easy way to listen to the song when away from my ipod. A user can go to my home page and click the play button and find out what I am currently digging.
If you go there currently, you will see that I removed the mp3 files, and that if you currently click on play, nothing will play. I had to do this because of this traffic issue, and these sites. Hopefully I can figure out an alternative way to post these items since this has been one of my favorite features of my site.
Im not sure what was sadder though. The fact that I got slammed by China, or the amount of times the different songs were grabbed. Jay-Z was grabbed almost 5 thousand times. Phoenix only about 600. And sadly, Belle and Sebastian only about 60 times. Poor Belle and Sebastian. Its a genius song however.