Well, round two on blogging yourself into debt...

Well, my last blog entry was about how I blogged myself into debt by actually having too many people read my blog. Imagine that, too many people doing what you want them to do. I still think there is a problem on the server that I was operating on, due to the fact that with only one blog posting I was still using nearly 1 GB an hour of traffic. For the non-technical that is about the same that a decent DSL line will allow in an hour.

So anyway, the bandwidth continued to grow and my bill was looking more and more every single hour, with nothing published, so I contrinued to call godaddy.com to express my worries. Well, it seems the communication had already moved up the food chain so that when I was on for the second time on the 17th of Nov, another person picked up declaring he was from the Office of The President. What that meant, I didn't really know, but it was sounding a bit more promising that someone from legal or security might sound. He stated that I was one of the first people to use this product from godaddy and one of the most popular in way of traffic and visitors. They wanted to work with me to figure out what was happening and to see if they could provide me enough bandwidth to keep my site operational without these monster bills. They also stated they were going to credit back the bill for the bandwidth up to that point. They agreed that it would be not a viable product if there was a bandwidth limit for blogs, when I could get a free site (and have at blogger.com called knolinuxguy.blogger.com) and not worry about this.

I am still a bit cautious about all of this, I mean unless they create tools to allow bloggers to see the traffic they are generating, then there is no way to see where the trend will cross the bandwidth limits. This simple, but necessary, network engineering tool would be the first step in me not worrying about whether or not.

The biggest irony in all of this to me was that I was on bobparsons.com, the CEO of godaddy reading his blog while I was on hold, and he just published an article talking about the methods of business that basically was titled "The secret John D. Rockefeller used to build Standard Oil. It's simple. Putting it to work in your business." In this nice little post, he talks about knowing exactly what your product is costing you, what is working, what is not, so on and so forth. This is exactly how I try to function in my wireless career, knowing exactly what each component of our network does, needs and how it affects surrounding pieces. However, this is exactly the tools I am missing from this quick blogger to do what he is talking about. They limit your bandwidth but provide no tools to monitor that bandwidth. I can see IP addresses of people who hit my site, but not on a daily or hourly basis. It also combines the IP hit from a single address into a tally instead of telling me how, when and where. I can't see how is printing each article, just how many people total have printed them. I can't even see the amount storage each posting is taking, even though I have a limit of 300 MB. For the longest time, even with a ton of pics in my postings (I deleted those from the posts, you can see them at knolinuxguy.blogger.com) I was at 0.00 MB of storage.

So my opinion is that this is at most an Alpha product and should be tweaked with many add ons, which really are not add ons but fundamental tools for the blogger to have, if they are going to place limits. If they want a product similar to blogger, wordpress, or others, they need to not worry about it, see how successful they are, they re-evaluate periodically to see where they are spending too much and where is the product being successful. Hey, they sounds a lot like Bob's posting. I guess he knows how to do it, let's see if his company can put it into practice for this.

Thanks for reading this, hopefully we will keep everyone up to speed on what is happening.

Cheers!!!!!

KnoLinuxGuy