Reached another hits milestone yesterday.
Since signing up with TypePad in April 2004 (the blog itself has existed since February 2004), I’ve had a quarter million hits.
Cool!
(Downside: I’m expected to bust my bandwidth allotment this month. Don’t know what they’ll do, if anything, when that happens.)
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
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Have you thought of allowing us to make donations to help handle growing bandwidth needs?
I, too, would be more than happy to contribute to the cause.
I quick analysis of the front page shows you’ve done just about all you can to keep the pages lightweight (bandwidth-wise). No heavy jpegs or gifs. Typepad is serving gzip’d html which helps further on the HTML delivery. (reduces bytes transmitted by ~60-70%) Typepad also supports ‘304’ return codes so that nothing needs to be transmitted if the site (or rss feed) hasn’t changed since the last visit by a user’s browser/aggregator.
It really doesn’t get much more optimal than that. Perhaps if your topics weren’t so darn interesting! 🙂 Perhaps you need to do more naval gazing, like a typical weblog…
About the only thing that might kill your bandwidth is if some portion of your readers who subscribe via RSS/Atom have their refresh rate turned up too high. Every other hour should be enough. Some aggregators come with high defaults out of the box — like 15 minute intervals — while other aggregators don’t support ‘304’ return codes that typepad would like to send them.
Do you want us all to cut down on the number of times we visit? 🙂
From what I can tell from other sites I’ve visited with the same problem, usually when you exceed your bandwidth your site becomes unaccessable (at least to the public) until you receive the next period’s ration.
I agree: Start a pledge drive! 🙂
Staring out at the sea is typical of weblogs…? 😉
Perhaps it is at Captain’s Quarters.
Scott: Thanks for the insightful analysis!
Brad: NO! I want people to visit *more*! (And leave more comments.)
Mia: I don’t know that that’s what’ll happen here. I’m already paying TypePad, and in fact I’m at their top pay rate premium level dealie-bob. If I were at a lower one, they might close access to the blog until I (a) got to the new month or (b) paid for a higher level, but I suspect they won’t want to hack off their premium level subscribers.
In fact, they’ve always been a really nice, relaxed company to work with and have great customer service. Whenever I enter a trouble ticket, they get back very promptly.
I suspect that since I’m paying their top rate (which isn’t that high) that they may just let the overage slide, esp. since it’s not anticipated to be a big overage.
Also, I’m sure that Amy Welborne (who also uses TypePad)’s traffic is much higher than mine and her blog doesn’t get shut down (so far as I know).
Thanks also to all who volunteered to contribute financially. I’m not sure yet if I want to go that way. As long as people are enjoying the blog and interacting with it (e.g., via comments) then that make it enjoyable for me and I don’t mind incurring the cost.
If you want to help out, though, clicking the Amazon links here on the blog will (theoretically) give me a tiny kickback on the purchase price of whatever you buy (even if it isn’t the same product whose link you clicked). Haven’t yet seen one of those cheques that Amazon’s supposed to send me, tho. 🙂
I help to moderate one of the largest Christian Forums on the internet and that periodically crashes due to ‘heavy traffic’ etc…perhaps I had better make this my last comment for a while…I only just found this place (funnily enough, the recommendation to visit this site came from someone there with whom I believe you are acquainted) and I’m rather enjoying it wouldn’t want it to overload!
God Bless.
Ukok: Don’t worry about it! We’re not in any danger of crashing the site! Comment away! (In fact, I would like folks to comment *more* 🙂
In that case, I should warn you that i usually have a lot to say about a lot of things, but unfortunatley, it’s often inane or irrelevant…still want my comment’s 😉
God Bless.
p.s. I apologise for not reading the prior comment’s, i need not have been concerned about an imminent ‘crash’ if I had.