How to blog yourself into debt

Well, this story is about the downside of blogging. Most articles you read are on how to create a website, drive traffic, blog for free, blah, blah, and of course blah...

So I had already purchased a website for my wireless consulting company a few years back at godaddy.com called knowireless. Catchy name huh? My wife came up with that one. So when I started to blog about wireless on blogger.com, I decided to look into using my knowireless.com account and created a new one for linux I called knolinux.com. The idea was to review various distributions and help new users on which one would be best for them by showing them the installation process with graphical screen shots (which was my undoing) and hope that a couple of people would come over to Linux and enjoy it as much as I do. But I digress.

So for about three months I created a total of 16 posts with pretty cool pictures. I published these via distrowatch.com, a website that really shows all the decent linux distros and helps people keep track on the ever growing process of the Linux/Open Source movement.

Well, in only two months I had over 70,000 people review my articles and over 90 feedbacks on the blog. In the little survey, 95% had positive things to say about the work I was doing. I even made a few bucks via google adsense along the way.

Well, as things were ramping up even more in my opinion (I was looking to branch into writing about Linux on Apple PPC machines) I got an email from godaddy stating I had a bill for a bit over $312 because of the bandwidth of over 45000 MB. As I am a network engineer, I started to look for my website's statistics of traffic, usually listed after the website with a '/stats'. Much to my dismay, there are no stats for the product that godaddy calls 'quickblogger'.

I called and asked about this, and they stated they would escalate this issue, as I don't think that the 70,000 reads would generate this level of bandwidth, and I got an email basically stating due to my graphical nature of my website and since it was so popular, I had actually used this much bandwidth. They still can't show me this usage, because it just isn't available, so just trust them.

Since then I have restarted my blogger.com account under this address, using email posting from my gmail by copying and pasting to the email composer, then emailing to the link I created in the settings for email posting. I then went to my POS godaddy account and deleted all of the graphics off the site. I won't be posting any new blogs there, only here.

So if you ever plan on starting a blog, I would suggest using a more reputable site like blogger.com, wordpress.com, or others that are really set up to support blogging rather than some hosting company that just wants to milk you beyond what they offer which is a miserably small amount of bandwidth. I guess they never expect you to be able to support traffic. Who knows. Stay away from godaddy.com, do not use them.

I am still planning on moving forward with my linux website. I hope to learn from this and move on. If you feel sorry for me, click on a few adds either at knolinux.com, or here on blogger.com, so I can't take some google money and help pay my bill.

Thanks for reading and hopefully from my mistake you won't repeat it in your blogging life.

Best wishes

Cheers!!!!

KnoLinuxGuy