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"Bandwith: A Website's Best Friend and Worst Enemy"
Written: July 6, 2001

This editorial covers the issue of bandwith and how it concerns you and me. First of all, to those of you who don't know what bandwith is: bandwith is basically data transfer. If you have an html that takes up 7 KB and two pictures on it that are 60 KB together then everytime that page is loaded your website transfers 67 KB of bandwith.

I decided to make an editorial regarding bandwith because it has become a major concern of mine. This site SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY seems to be going over Topcities' bandwith limit multiple times a month. That is ridiculous! If a site with as small of an audience as mine with no multimedia except for a few pictures on every page can go over the bandwith limit on a fairly regular basis, then I can't begin to imagine the problems other sites are facing.

The only way to get rid of the bandwith issue is to pay for an upgrade, but that is something I really do not want to do. First of all, I have a very little amount of money. I won't have a job until school starts because no one in my town is hiring, especially someone who can only work for the summer when they have kids that will be able to work the whole school year. I don't even know if my school job will be guaranteed when school starts. So money is something that I just don't have.

I would be happy to pay for awesome hosting services if I had money up the wazoo. However, there are even more problems with paying for an upgrade. First of all, I DO NOT TRUST internet companies. I don't have the time or the energy to go searching around for who can offer me the best services for a certain amount of money, so for all I know Topcities or Hypermart could rip me off and I wouldn't even know it. Second, NO ONE lasts on the internet. One day my host/server could go bankrupt and I would be in huge trouble. Third, I am afraid of contracts and agreements with companies. For all I know they could add something to the contract after I agree to it and find a way to charge me more money than we originally agreed on. This is probably what I fear the most. If the fee was a one time fee I would happily pay it, even if it was a few hundred dollars. But monthly charges could change. The price could go up or I could go over the limit and they'd charge me extra money. It really scares me what they could do if they wanted. Fourth, I don't want to give my address to my host/server. If they decided to charge me extra money and I wasn't able to pay it they might take me to court or something extreme like that. In case you haven't noticed, I've been thinking about this for a long time and the possibilities of being royally ripped off are scary.

In the best case scenario, my host/server would be very happy that I was paying to be hosted. They would stick to the original agreement of a monthly fee. They would close my site down for the day if it went over the agreed bandwith limit. There would be no surprises; no extra costs and no bandwith limits even though the upgrade says "unlimited bandwith." That would be perfect; that I would agree to. But companies can easily rip me off or get me in trouble and I really do not want to risk that. That is why I want to keep this free. I don't want to pay to work on this site and I want to be able to have a large audience. Again, this bandwith limit is ridiculous, as I will go into further detail in the next paragraph.

Okay, let's use my index page as an example. Topcities free membership has a maximum bandwith limit of 600MB per month. My index.html is 21.8 KB in size and the pictures total up to be roughly 55 KB (including the banner Topcities puts at the top of the page). Now, this adds up to about 67 KB each time someone loads the main page. And my main page isn't fancy looking at all! This means I can only have about 1970 visits a month on my main page before I go over the limit! That is just insane.

To make matters worse, Hypermart looks like they are going to charge me for the older version of this site going over the bandwith limit multiple times. I just logged into the Data Transfer section of my account today. If I had any idea they would charge me for going over the bandwith limit, I would've eliminated the possibility by turning it into a redirection page. I didn't do that when I moved to Topcities (I just made it that way today) because I wanted people to be able to look through the old version of my site for archive's sake and so potential hosts could view what I used to offer back when I had multimedia up for grabs. Plus, I was afraid Hypermart would delete my account if they found out the page was only a redirection page. If most of my traffic comes from that location, then them deleting my account would screw me over. So I just hope they don't end up charging me, or worse...

So where does this bring us? What's the point I'm making? A bandwith limit is a serious handicap for a website. Those calculations earlier in this editorial freaked me out. I can't believe I'm only limited to AT MOST that many visitors per month. That's just the index page! And I didn't even take the daily bandwith limit into consideration. The other point I tried to make was until I get a good, dependable source of income I can't and really don't want to pay for hosting services; not only because of the money factor but because of my distrust with internet companies and their services. So, for now, I'm going to try to cut down on the sizes and amount of pictures on this site and hope for the best. (And in case you didn't understand the title: bandwith is a website's worst enemy because of how it can impair a site, such as mine, and it's a website's best friend because everyone wants a lot of visitors coming to their site and visitors cause bandwith).

-Sir Viktor-

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