Some of you have been noticing various apache errors (404 in particular). Over the past week I’ve been blocking files and directories on this site because we came VERY close to our bandwidth limit. Actually, we exceeded it, but the webhost doesn’t seem to count the last 6 hours against us (that is, it checks every 6 ours and if we exceed it will block the site, but since we exceeded bandwidth in the last 6 hours of February on the machine’s clock it wasn’t a problem). I actually had to buy extra bandwidth.
Anyway, for some reason over the past few months our bandwidth demands have outrun our traffic by a bunch. I suspect it was the spate of PDFs we were offering early last month, but, it might also be google queries accessing the large archive files more frequently as they became more numerous. I have blocked off access to many of the PDFs. My plan is to eventually shift them over to the “gnxpfiles” group and update the links.
For those with accounts on GNXP I strongly suggest you cut down on the posting of pictures that reference the file from within the website, and use “gnxpfiles” to store PDFs. On a note of manners, I also am asking that you not steal bandwidth from small websites, though I don’t care if you do it from a source which wouldn’t notice the hit.
On a further note, you might have noted also that I have really constrained the number of entries that show on the front page, reducing the range down to only the past 3 days. I know some of you think this is short, and I initially did it because I wanted to have a cheap way of reducing the bandwidth over the past week, but I actually like it as it keeps old discussions from getting out of hand. If you really want to continue a discussion with someone I suggest e-mail, or looking up the entry using the search function.
Addendum: OK, I’ve moved the front page to 5 days. That should be long enough for discussions to run out of steam….
Posted by razib at 04:41 PM