A wish
: You can donate money and clothes and cars to good causes. You can donate even frequent flier miles. I wish there were a way to donate bandwidth… Pedram put up a very widely read post because he was doing God’s work getting donations to the earthquake victims in Iran and he maxed out on his bandwidth and brought down his site… When I put up videos at first and I was on the world’s worst host, I maxed out and also killed my site… We’ve seen others hit peaks because they did something good — is this the first medium in which you’re punished for success? — and either we lose their sites or they lose money buying more bandwidth…. I wish there were a way to pool some bandwidth chits to help those people during those peaks…. I know, that’s called P2P but I wish there were another way until that arrives…
Headshot
Social
Thoughtful post Jeff. My site is back up again, after spending even more to “upgrade” my plans with a host that was also late to respond.
My blog was set up for about a dozen friends. I have upgraded three times now as that number grew to a few more, then a few hundreds, then a few thousands. If my minimal ads don’t start to offset some of the costs, something more serious needs to be done soon.
Jeff,
I wonder if FreeCache would be solution?
http://www.archive.org/web/freecache.php
BitTorrent is the right technical solution to the popularity penalty. It’s just too hard to use right now. I predict we’ll ahve usable clients and management tools within 3 to 6 months.
A host could set up that ability (to donate bandwidth — or money for such). Most don’t because it’s easier to do recuring ‘automatic’ billings.
My blog house hosting could do it. That would also be a way to host Iraqi blogs. We could get them off blogsplat…