Hang in there. TeleRead went down earlier today because of a server problem at the 1and1.com hosting service, and you might still find the site rather slow. For the latest, you can e-mail me with the subject line of “TeleReads status.”
Adding to my joy, 1and1 informed me that TeleRead would have to move from a group server to a managed or dedicated one because of our volume of traffic. That one baffles me. Except for a few podcasts, whose listener count is hardly to be confused with NBC’s, we’re not doing multimedia. The visitor count, maybe 1,200 on a good weekday, is fine for a niche site but not huge. While I’m pleased to see the TeleRead site growing. I’m not too happy about the additional costs. Anyone have any ideas, such as donated server space? I’d rather not inflict ad clutter on you. Meanwhile 1and1 is supposed to have more details on the way to me; I’ll be curious to see if a spammer or other sleaze might be doing something on the server side.
Speaking of the site—not just the blog: What changes would you like in the home page of TeleRead.org? I propose more headlines and some TechMeme-style features. On the other hand, Tamas Simon, who’s been providing me some ideas, is urging a Digg.com-style approach. What do you prefer?
I seriously doubt you have 1200 unique visitors a day. If you have several thousand webpages (that’s what you told me over the telephone), and if comment spam is hitting every single one of them daily, that can take its toll. You probably should should look at bandwidth stats from your webhost and also stats for individual pages (not the main page).
I have a low traffic site with 1500 webpages. Not many live people, but the amount of posts multiplies the spam.
Robert, the 1,200 is on a GOOD day with UNIQUE visitors as measured by Wundercounter. On the other hand, the comment spam could be a factor. Perhaps that’s the answer to the mystery. Certainly it uses up resources to fend it off. At the bottom of the page you’ll see: “This blog is protected by Spam Karma 2: 171410 Spams eaten and counting.”
Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts. I’m glad I’m sharing this in public so people can follow through with their own suggestions.
Thanks,
David
P.S. the 1,200 does not include RSS-only accesses.
I would like a favicon, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon, i.e. a small icon associated with the web page (or site) that a tabbed browser can use to identify the page. Anything with (say) the green teleread color would do.
There are probably a lot of people like me, who read the site via RSS and only visit it when motivated to comment. Do those count against bandwidth somehow without bumping your hit counter?
Ross and Allen…
Ross: The RSS accesses do count against bandwidth even if they don’t show up in the Wundercounter.
Allen: Excellent suggestion. When we reinvent the site, a Favicon ideally can be included.
Thanks,
David
Ummm, do you have access to server logs or can 1and1.com tell you exactly what your monthly bandwidth has been?
1200 unique visitors should be very low monthly traffic, but that can be affected by how many pages each user visits, the RSS traffic, etc. Somewhere someone should be able to give you actual bandwidth usage (for example, I have a site that has about 50,000-80,000 unique visitors each day, and the biggest consumer of bandwidth are the search engine bots which might only count for one unique visitor, but eat up a ton of bandwidth, especially on sites with lots of pages, as I imagine Teleread has).
Bandwidth is very cheap these days in hosting plans — whatever you’re paying now, you can always find a better deal. The problem is finding a good host that isn’t going to screw you over at one point or another.
1and1 hosts OLPC news among several other sites I have, which combined cross 10K of unique users per day and yet I’ve had no bandwidth problems.
Check your server log in detail to make sure you don’t have large images eating bandwidth and then push back with 1and1
I often find that they are very absolute at first, but with enough badgering, they yeild to your needs. Oh and use the email customer support. The phone help is useless.