So last week I hit an error message when I logged on here, at my little internet home. It was a message I hadn’t seen before, and honestly the first error message I’ve ever gotten since switching to WordPress last year.
It included the words “bandwidth”, which made me pretty sure that this was a hosting issue, not anything I could solve on my own. Lucky for me I am on a first-name basis with my hosting service, eh??
I emailed my friend and internet server host, Dan, and I was up and rolling in minutes. Later that week at dinner, we talked about what happened.
Turns out, for the first time in Gotchababy history, I had exceeded the bandwidth he’d allotted me. So I asked how that had happened, and he took me into Box Crush headquarters for a peek at my server stats to explain. I’m probably missing a few key elements, but here’s what I got from our conversation:
Bandwidth is the space on his server each website takes. Each website has an amount that is preset for each month.
Articles or blog posts, along with images, on the front page of your blog/website take up a certain amount of bandwidth. Each time a visitor comes to your site, she takes up that amount of bandwidth. So the more traffic you get, the more bandwidth you use. The more posts you post, along with more images, the more bandwidth you use.
So let’s look at last week:
I posted about the Jr.’s birthday with photos.
I posted about Father’s day with photos.
I participated in IComLeWe, which bumped up my traffic.
I also participated in Works for Me Wednesday, which bumped up my traffic.
Kind of a perfect storm for using up bandwidth, especially toward the end of the month.
It’s still not as easy to measure as, say, user minutes on a mobile phone, but it does make a little more sense– did I miss any key points, Dan???