Most people don't realize that the web site owner is responsible for paying the bandwidth when it exceeds the amount allowed on a server. Most of the time, even sites that have a fair amount of traffic rarely use more than 10 gigs of bandwidth in a month, but so many people went to see "America" that by Wednesday night, less than 48 hours after I had first sent an email to my personal list of under 100 people, over 200 gigs of bandwidth had been used. The closest estimate I've got is that since 60 gigs was in the neighborhood of 27,000 page views, the next day's use of over 170 gigs means that well over 200,000 page views, or a person who lets the entire page download, occurred within those 48 hours.
Although I do not blame anyone, the fact is that I lost 2 of my web sites -one, the domain for my son who was taken from me in 1993, was down for almost 2 weeks and the other, my card site, which meant more to me than anyone could possibly know. Without it, and all I learned by putting it together, I would never have made the movie that I did. Although my son's site was restored, I am rebuilding my card site from a new domain name. I was forced to give up my hosting business and will have to try build my design client base back. There is still an outstanding bandwidth bill of almost $2,000 which I cannot afford to pay, but I have been told that, like the all star tribute to heroes that used online donations, I can use a portion of the proceeds of the CD sales to pay the bill. I wish I could pay it, but I can't and it's not fair to stick my server with the bill, either, so since the first money collected at the All Star Tribute paid directly for web space and band width, and I am not as well off as those people, no one should object.
If they do, I have one thing to say to them:
"While you are entitled to
your opinion because, after all this IS America, after you put something
on your site that thousands of people want, and need, to see and have a
bill like mine, that's when that opinion that you are entitled and free
to have will actually mean enough to me that I might listen to it, but for now, I just can't."
ali