Albanach.org web site down (temporarily!)

**M. A. C. Newsome** · 29th March 07, 04:46 AM

Hi guys,

For any of you who may be attempting to access my web site, it went down sometime yesterday due to having exceeded my monthly bandwidth alottment.

Now, this happened to me once before as my site was growing in popularity and getting more traffic. The fix was easy. I just bought more bandwidth and the site was back up within minutes. At the time, I thought I was buying enough bandwidth to handle the growth in popularity of my site.

However, this time it's a little weird. Without giving away specific traffic stats, my bandwidth use has been slowly increasing, more or less doubling over the course of the year... untill now.

During the month of March, it looks like my bandwidth use has jumped up by a factor of 10! This is unprecidented. Especially since I have done nothing out of the ordinary to promote my site this month.

So I'm in contact with my "people" now about this (sounds like an H&R Bloc commercial, I know, but I have "people"). If my site really has suddenly become this popular, great. I'll be buying more bandwidth space. But if this is a technical glitch, or something more sinister like a hacker attack or something, they should be able to tell me what happened. And that will be fixed, too.

So, either way, my site should be back up soon. We're working on it. Thanks for being patient.

FYI, this is for my personal web site, www.albanach.org, and any dependant sites (like kilts.albanach.org or blog.albanach.org).

The Scottish Tartans Museum web site, www.scottishtartans.org, as well as its gift shop site, giftshop.scottishtartans.org, are completely unaffected. They are up and running perfectly fine.

Aye,
Matt

**Tattoo Bradley** · 29th March 07, 06:33 AM

I was trying to access your blog last night and discovered this...

**JimB** · 29th March 07, 06:44 AM

Matt,
I just wanted you to know that I regularly visit your site. I can't post comments there because of my internet police, but I can look. I always enjoy your insights. You do a good job.
Thanks!

**Caradoc** · 29th March 07, 06:44 AM

Originally Posted by M. A. C. Newsome

So I'm in contact with my "people" now about this (sounds like an H&R Bloc commercial, I know, but I have "people"). If my site really has suddenly become this popular, great. I'll be buying more bandwidth space. But if this is a technical glitch, or something more sinister like a hacker attack or something, they should be able to tell me what happened. And that will be fixed, too.

I've had similar things happen to my own site, but since I host from a computer in my house I can generally see what the problems are.

Mostly it happens when I've got a picture posted on my site that other people decide they like. So it gets posted to some forum or another, and then I'm suddenly getting thousands of hits to a single picture that's being "passed around" via hotlinking.

You'll probably want to do a traffic analysis.

**Panache** · 29th March 07, 06:48 AM

Matt,

Thanks for keeping us in the loop. I am also a frequent visitor to your blog.

Cheers

Panache

**Kid Cossack** · 29th March 07, 06:50 AM

Drat! Matt, I always look forward to your blog posts, very informative and frequently drool-worthy.

**Mike1** · 29th March 07, 07:08 AM

Moved from General Kilt Talk to Off Topic.

**auld argonian** · 29th March 07, 07:10 AM

As Tartan Day nears is it not logical that the hits would increase?

You're a victim of your own success, Matt.

Best

AA

**M. A. C. Newsome** · 29th March 07, 07:49 AM

Originally Posted by Caradoc

Mostly it happens when I've got a picture posted on my site that other people decide they like. So it gets posted to some forum or another, and then I'm suddenly getting thousands of hits to a single picture that's being "passed around" via hotlinking.

Ever since I saw a photograph I took being used to sell goods on another commercial web site, I have disabled the "right click" option on my pages to prevent people from stealing my images.

I suppose this wouldn't stop people from directly linking to my images, though, would it? How do I go about checking to see if this is the case? (I don't know nearly as much about the technical side of the internet as I like to pretend I do!). :-)

~M