File Space and Band Width Usage

The day before we went away, the Christ Church website (hosted by PlusNet) was taken down because it had exceeded its bandwidth allocation. It is a great unknown to me just what is out there on the web, trawling (crawling) around for the content of various websites. The excess wasn't spectacular, because it had been stopped, but had happened by 3am. If someone had tried to copy the site, and then someone else tried to do the same, that would account for it.

We post sermons on the site, and this may be one of the reasons that our bandwidth usage is increasing (the sign of a successful site). Certainly, there was a lot of interest from many places on the talk by Dr Salim Munayer from the Bethlehem Bible college, on the Holy Land.

I started the work necessary to restore the site. Log in was the first problem, it had been ages. The password I thought I remembered was not working, neither were the variants of it. I phoned support and told them I had needed the password. They went through several security questions, one of which is "What is the first and second letter of your password?" Luckily, I had the first two letters correctly remembered.

I had some work to do in the Church Office, so went there to do it. The site was still not back. We had been offline over 12 hours. I phoned Customer Services and asked about the possibilities of upgrades, and explained why I was asking. Where might our custom have to go if we can't get our site back? I made sure I sounded very unhappy. I talked about our users being unable to access the information they needed. I said that I thought a business service should be better managed. All this did the trick, the site was restored in minutes.

I am still fighting the system - trying to get support to respond; trying to get the information I need to manage the situation. The responses are slow and inaccurate so far. Webspace statistics only get updated when you do an upload, and then it may take 24 hours. Bandwidth Statistics are recorded and presented graphically, but access to some graphs is not available from our account on the portal.

PlusNet generally have a good reputation, but I notice that they are no longer in the top few ISPs since they were bought by BT.

Now I am looking at the alternatives. Especially as three days into the new accounting month, we are already approaching 25% of the month's allocation. We do not have money to burn, but will pay our way. So I started with the free file sharing services. The first failed at the sign-up process, the promised e-mail that I must respond to never came. The second one is FrostBytez. It's in America, but beggars can't be choosers. If it's all working, this URL should be a line drawing of the church building: http://upload.frostbytez.com/index.php/image/direct/FjJ48fZ2xQ/christ-church-orig.jpg

Try it and let me know if it doesn't work.