Last year I began to host various galleries of media collage online as an expansion of this site’s scope. An offshoot of this project – the Truthful Translations of Political Speech gallery – has taken on a life of its own.
The media collage sections of this site now account for at least half its traffic and most of its bandwidth use. As MP3 files are much larger than web pages, the bandwidth demands have grown with time, especially as the collage galleries have grown. I had plans to expand them further, with new galleries and a slew of new Truthful Translations which I’ve collected over the last few weeks.
On Friday, Oct. 17, a web site featured DIYmedia and posted three links to here. One was to a web page; the other two were direct links to MP3 files (specifically, “Rush Limbaugh Sings I’m a Nazi” and a racy Martha Stewart clip). Subsequently the server hosting this site got whomped and bandwidth use maxed out at 1 mbps/sec for most of the day.
DIYmedia shares a ‘net connection with dozens of other web sites, and the massive bandwidth suck caused traffic to all of them to slow to a crawl. That forced my kind, generous, and gracious hosting provider to take DIYmedia offline temporarily Friday. He’s subsequently restored access to everything except the pages/files linked to by the offending web site, which obviously has little sense of ‘net etiquette.
‘Net etiquette lesson of the day: If you like the MP3s collected here, please download them and share them with others. Or link to the web pages here – but NOT directly to the files themselves.
[Update 11/11: Further expansion on the collage galleries has been frozen until a server move can be accomplished, hopefully before the new year.]
This is all incredibly frustrating because spreading the subersiveness is the ultimate goal, and just as the momentum gets rolling the entire project is jeopardized. I’m exploring several options ranging from begging for benefactor-hosts with bandwidth on which to store the MP3 collection to purchasing my own 1U rack mount server and moving the entire site to a faster host (likely quadrupling the out-of-pocket expenses paid every month for your pleasure).
I’m wide open to advice on this one and could really use any helpful suggestions.
Skip to content