Aww, Jay. Don't be sorry that it's not up; you should demand that we thank you for it being up.

Just out of curiosity, how much is your bandwidth limit?

No need to apologize Jay. Thanks for all the effort you put into the site.

Thanks, Sean and Dusty for the kind words. =)

Markus - The plan that I have with my current hosting provider allows me 100GB per month. I have already extended that by 10GB by paying an additional $35, since I thought that would get me through Friday. But my reports show that after today (Thursday) my usage will be roughly 108.2GB, which leaves about half of what I'll need for Friday.

Might switching to full-text fields help? It'd cost more bandwidth on the feed, but maybe less on people hitting the website to read the full text of each entry and to get the link to the game.

James - I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

I have implemented some optimizations that have significantly reduced the size of several pages. In particular, each individual archive page displays the last 25 comments only, with a link to view older comments. For some of the larger archives with hundreds of comments, that alone has reduced page size from over 500KB to well under 100KB.

Graphics seem to be the major resource hog on my site, with all the screenshots and icons that I have displayed all over. I am not as willing to compromise on graphics as I believe they make the site easy to navigate, and they help with understanding the content.

In terms of usability, I would rather switch hosting providers than make any sweeping changes to the look and feel of the site. In fact, there are several features I want to add in the near future that will most likely require even more bandwidth.

Overall, I hope this will be the only instance in which my site goes dark for a period of time. My emergency move from RIT's servers last month caused me to scramble and make a hasty decision for a hosting provider. I have since found another with a more attractive plan that fits my usage requirements better. I just need to find some time to move the site again.

I do appreciate the suggestions and the support. =)

you might want to look into using the coral content distribution network for hosting your images. it's easy and free, you just have to alter your image URLs slightly and voila, they're automagically mirrored.

What about enabling gzip of your html? It is normally real easy to implement in PHP.

Check out: http://no2.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-gzhandler.php

I did this on my own page last week and saved 0.5GB every day.

You can test the effect here: http://www.whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/

You don't gzip your site by the looks of it, and you should:

http://leknor.com/code/gziped.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjayisgames.com

bah, it's okay we'll be alright without the site for a day....though there will be hundreds of people swimming in a sea of boredom for a while...
:D

We should help donate some cash to the site, since we love it so much. How about we do that?

Just to throw out some ideas:

Convert all of your images to ascii art. (joking of course)

Convert the classic images to black and white.

Delete the the large images from the main stories after they are off your front page, and in their place put a small box with a link to (see picture)

put your list of recommended games on a slow rotation. That way as someone navigates through your site they will not get a fresh set of icons with each page they visit.

Use frames. (ahhhh the devil nooooooo!!!!) On second thought don't.

show only the last 2 or three days instead of your current amount on the front page.

I am sure other people have even better ideas.

I appreciate all the ideas, thank you kindly.

All I need is to get through today, since I now have a number of ideas that will help prevent this situation in the future.

I have temporarily turned off the onmouseover effect of the icons in the sidebar to buy a little more time today. I'll turn that back on when the new month begins later tonight.

Heh. And I was just thinking about linking to you from Metafilter today...
I guess that would be bad...

Thanks, JS. Under any other circumstances I would welcome a link from Metafilter with open arms. =)

Dreamhost services my own blogging needs well enough. You might want to take a look and see if they offer a plan to fit your needs. The one I currently have is $7.95/month, 4.8GB storage, and 120GB bandwidth. I think the next level up is $15.95/month, 9.6 GB storage, and 144GB bandwidth. If that sounds good to you, check out their page at http://www.dreamhost.com

(And if you decide to sign up.. please let them know 'galoshes' referred you.. I'll get a little kickback too! Thanks.)

Fanatical - Thanks, I have already decided to move my site to Dreamhost. What sold me was the fact that they increase your monthly bandwidth allowance by 1GB per week.

Well, as someone mentioned before, adding a paypal donate button never hurts. ;)

I'd donate. Definitely give you a few bucks for your awesome website. :)

Well it looks like I may have squeezed through just under the wire. With just an hour and a half left, I guess I may have sounded the alarm unneccessarily. I figured it would be best to make people aware of the situation ahead of time in teh event of an outage. I'm just happy that a new month is here.

I appreciate all the support. Let's see how far I can take this site before I have to resort to begging for money. =)

I'll have a couple of new reviews up over the weekend, so check back soon.

cheers! everyone.

It's already been a month!? Wow time flies by...

Hi Jay, just thought you might want to check out using A Small Orange for website hosting. Their service is outstanding (I know this from what other people have said as well as some 2nd-hand experience) and if you go over your bandwidth limit, it only costs an extra $0.50 for every GB you go over per month.