This is the second time I claimed the bandwidth crisis (the last one). This time, it is more urgent and more severe.

The Data

The problem to be a successful blog related to high traffic is the bandwidth issue. Here is the data:

Data source: ipowerweb.com traffice report

The data indicates this site is serving 16,1797 visitors in December 2004, and transfered 51.53 gigabyte of data the same month. There is a huge jump in the number in the first 6 days of 2005. 17G of data has been transmitted till now. I got the warning from ISP that the bandwith for this month will run out in the middle of this month.

The Solution

URL redirect is my solution to this problem. Since Tim Berners Lee educated us that Cool URIs Never changes. I strongly believe a good website citizen needs to keep the URL of the published content unchanged. So I won’t consider move any part of the existing content on my website to another location.

I used the URL Rewrite Engine in my host computer. It works this way:

The URL for the picture has been “hard coded” in each of the blog entry. For example, this picture http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/2002/11/11/tokyo-islands-in.the.sea.jpg in this entry: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20021111_flying_over_the_pacific.htm seems to resides on the server home.wangjianshuo.com. Actually, it is not. I used the following rewrite rule:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule (archives/200[1234]/.*\.jpg) http://blog.wangjianshuo.com/$1 [R]

RewriteRule (photo/.*.jpg$) http://bbs.wangjianshuo.com/$1 [NC,R]

This rule indicates, whenever a client request a file that resides in archives/2001, archives/2002, archives/2003, archives/2004 folders with a .jpg extension, the server tell it not to bother to ask it from my server http://home.wangjianshuo.com; get it from blog.wangjianshuo.com, a server without any bandwidth limit instead. So I keep the content of each entry unchanged. Meanwhile, I kept a replica of the archive folder on the new server. I can change this location at any time. For /photo, it is the same.

I hope this is helpful for others who face the same situation. (Congratulations if you also worry about this issue).

Donation?

Eric offered to donate to help me overcome this problem. I appreciate it but it is not neccessary. It is far more expensive to add bandwidth to the existing package than buying a completely new one. I have choosen the URL Redirect solution. The Google advertisement on my site has covered all the hosting cost already.