Posted by on Aug 31, 2009 in My Business Adventures, Rants | 2 comments

So my site has been down for about 24 hours. Did you miss me? (Sometimes I’d love to see the expressions on my reader’s faces, I bet there is more than one person out there rolling their eyes right now)

The problem is that I had exceeded my bandwidth. Not that it was a big surprise, I had been monitoring the traffic to my site almost on a daily basis, hoping it wouldn’t go over. In fact, I had just increased the bandwidth a couple weeks back. It’s up to 17GB of bandwidth a month right now.

Frankly, I have no allusions of grandeur…I know for a fact all 17GB of traffic coming to my site aren’t individual people looking for my divine insight. I’m grateful if even just a handful of people out there find it worthwhile to even read this regularly.

In actuality, there’s a reasonable percentage of real traffic. I get maybe anywhere from 150 – 200 unique visitors a day to this site. (hello!) Not bad considering I really haven’t made any effort to market this.

What really is giving me a pain in the rear end is the bandwidth being eaten up by bad bots and search engines. You know I don’t mind of search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo come and archive the content on my site, but they say there’s a lot of random bots out there doing not much else but farming content from websites for no good reason at all. Summammabeetch.  If I’m reading my report right I have like 9GB of traffic just on random bots alone.

I gotta find a way to ban these bastards. So far the information found online to combat these bots aren’t very specific. I’ll report back if I find a way. I seem to notice any of my clients with photography websites seem to be encountering problems like this lately.