I’ve put it off time and again, but I’m going to have to resume my hunt for a new service provider pretty quick I think. I just checked the logs for the site and we’re hitting an all-time record for bandwidth usage this month. So far Christine from Blogomania hasn’t hit me up for overages, but I can’t imagine that will be the case forever and I’m far enough over my limit that it’s really not fair of me to take advantage of her generosity. My monthly limit is supposed to be 19 Gigs of data, but with three days left in the month I’ve already used 60.31 Gigs with SEB accounting for 54.77 Gigs out of the total.
In case you’re wondering, that’s a usage of 326%. Ouch.
The option to stick with Blogomania and go to a higher plan isn’t viable as their biggest account would cost $30 a month and only offers 30 Gigs of transfer. My thoughts of moving to Dreamhost are probably out as well as the Code Monster plan they offer has a limit of 64 Gigs a month and I’m quickly approaching that limit already. Bandwidth usage has grown about a Gig a month for the past three months allowing for maybe three months before I’d have to step up to Dreamhost’s Strictly Business level which gives 88 Gigs for $79.95 a month and I can’t afford that. For that much I may as well spend the extra $20 and rent a dedicated server from Server Beach and get 2000 Gigs of transfer a month and my own server to set up as I please.
Either way I’m back in the market so if you see any great deals on hosting packages that offer lots of transfer be sure to drop me a line and let me know. I’m really amazed we’re using this much transfer these days and I’m still hoping to avoid putting ads of any sort on the site, but I may have to consider something along those lines to help defray the costs of maintaining it. I’m really lucky that Blogomania hasn’t hit me up for the overages so far, but I don’t want to keep mooching off of them either.
Posted on 11/29/2004 at 04:01 PM 
I took a look at the offerings from 1&1 and their $49 a month dedicated server package looks like it would be perfect. It has plenty of bandwidth and lots of room. My only question is I have no idea how much of a server load running multiple sites like I am puts on a server so I have no idea if 2GHz Celeron based server is going to be adequate, but I suppose I’ll run into that question in every dedicated server offer I run across.
I’m going to check out a few other places you guys recommended as well, but 1&1 is looking pretty good so far.