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Popularity sucks
Traffic to FUGLY has been up lately—WAY up—which we mistook for a good thing, until we got the following note from the ISP that, otherwise, has been good as gold for the past year or so. Of all the things we though would force the site to shut down, it never occurred to us that it would end up having to go off-line because it's too popular.
BTW, don't freak out too soon ... since this note was first posted, we've found a solution to the problem.
Our ISP writes
Dear Mr. Kerr:
I think we've done this joke already, but it never ceases to amuse us that people think that "Joe Kerr" is any kind of real name. Of course, some parents are just cruel like that. I actually met a guy with the surname "Head" whose parents named him "Richard." Wanna guess what his nickname was?
So I guess it's possible that there really is a "Joe Kerr" out there somewhere.
Reports from our monitoring system indicate that your website has been generating traffic in excess of the 10 GB/month allotment for your account for at least three consecutive months.
Yup, FUGLY has been getting bunches of hits, about 100,000 per day, which ads up to about three million or so each month. Most commercial sites, run by businesses with a valid purpose for being on the Internet, don't do that kind of transfer—and here we are just fartin' around, putting them all to shame.
You may have noticed a decrease in the reliability of your site ... periods in which your site has performed poorly, or has been inaccessible.
We haven't noticed, but we've gotten a few e-mails from folks who have. They get all dramatic, like not being able to access FUGLY is some sort of major inconvenience.
I mean, it's cool and all if you think the site's funny and drop by to visit from time to time, but it's really not worth planning your day around it.
We would like you to review the materials on your site with an eye toward optimization. Often, high transfer rates can be the result of a moderate amount of "hits" on a few large multimedia files, and decreasing the size of those files can bring your account within system tolerances. However, that may provide only temporary relief.
With the exception of the logfiles for Name That Mongoloid, which get to be a couple hundred Kb, there's really nothing huge on the site—most the photos are under 10K apiece. It's just volume.
To effect a permanent solution, it will be necessary to upgrade your account. Sites that exceed our transfer limits often require a dedicated server solution, which [COMPANY] does not presently provide.
Ain't that a mofo? I mean, we've been asked to find a new ISP before, but never because of the good kind of popularity. It's usually because somebody moaned (one letter came pouring in) about a photo on the site, and the ISP was some mom-and-pop operation that could be buffaloed because they didn't have a legal staff to advise them of what "copyright" really means.
Getting asked to relo the site because it's too successful is completely unexpected—kinda like getting asked for a divorce because you're too good of a spouse.
But I guess that, in technical terms, it's probably a valid reason: a server, and the wires that connect it to the world, can only take so much traffic; and if they're set up like most ISPs, we're really screwing things up for the 150 or so other sites on the same server.
Unless you can bring your traffic within tolerances, we will be unable to continue servicing your account. [COMPANY] will certainly honor its contractual obligations to you by continuing to host your site, and will make every effort to ensure the best performance possible under the circumstances, for the duration of the present hosting agreement, but we cannot accept a renewal when your hosting agreement expires.
Nothing particularly amusing about that, but it's worth repeating for the sake of fairness. They're being as accommodating as they can, and we don't mean to suggest otherwise.
But the unfortunate fact is that the only way to "bring our traffic within tolerances" is to get fewer hits, which is really pretty screwy. I mean, how do you get less traffic—and who'd want to do that even if they could?
Man, popularity sucks.
... your customer service representative ... can provide a list of recommended ISPs that provide hosting solutions for high-traffic accounts.
The main problem with moving the site to high-bandwidth hosting providers is cost: it's way up there. While we can afford to toss away $25/month on this kind of idiocy, buying a dedicated server from a Fortune-500 Telco is well beyond our means, and even the mid-range providers want several hundred per month.
Of all the things we though would force the site to shut down, it never occurred to us that it would end up having to go off-line because it's too popular.
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The solution ...
The bad news is that we've been forced into accepting banner ads on the site — but the good news is that they're generating enough revenue to help keep it afloat. We were able to move to a sturdier server and keep the site alive.
And so, the beat goes on.
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