Weather for today, tomorrow and the next day at the Watercress Line. Also link to 5-day forecast for Alresford, Hampshire (HQ of the Watercress Line)
| 30th August
2005: Extract from an e-mail sent to our new webhost service: ....snip.... My reason for seeking more bandwidth is that our website has been getting about 3 million hits a month, with about 100GB/month downloaded by our customers. It is now apparent that I have chosen SupaNames for our new web-host unwisely. I thought your free 4000MB/month limit referred just to uploads. My fault for misunderstanding the very clear description of what you offer in your PremiumHost package. To give some idea of the scale of our problem: we recorded nearly 4000 downloads of a 4.2MB web-movie in the first 4 days after uploading: fortunately this was just before our change of web-host, but that alone would have consumed more than four times our 'free' monthly bandwidth with SupaNames. (It is now accessible only from my homepage: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tonywoodtw/mhr/runaways.wmv) In my previous experience of only 4 webhosts - I am the unpaid webmaster of 'www.watercressline.co.uk' ab initio - I have never encountered a limit on downloads by visitors to a website. (I created the Watercress Line website in 1999 with AOL as webhost. They sold to ViaNetworks whose service was excellent until they were taken over in late 2004 by ClaraNet, when the many problems began which prompted our move to SupaNames.) In order to maintain website service without incurring very high additional charges, I have had drastically to prune the archive files available on our site. Our purchase of 100GB of bandwidth allows us a few weeks to consider our next move. Best regards Tony Wood Sorry everyone! ... tw 27th August 2005: Migration of our website is now complete, but please use F5 to ensure you have the latest page; you may get an out-of-date page if you don't. For those who are interested in such things, uploading our entire website to new servers from my home computer took about 9 hours altogether: uploading is always much slower (21KB/sec) than downloading, but this is faster than before our migration. Background 24th Aug 2005: I'm sorry if you have been checking our website lately for its usual frequent updates and were disappointed to find fewer than usual. Your webmaster has been in frequent contact with ClaraNet, who in late 2004 took over ViaNetworks (our excellent web-host ab initio), to ask why from Friday 19th August 2005 he could no longer gain access to their servers to update our files. He was understandably peeved at repeatedly hearing on their "Support" line: "You are at queue position ten" or whatever, then having to explain the problem yet again, only to be told: "I'll call you back" - and they didn't. (Well they did once, to tell me that the problem still hadn't been fixed.) Constant checking revealed access was restored late afternoon on 23rd August 2005 and our urgent updates were done. ClaraNet rang tw on the afternoon of 24th Aug to say it was all now working. Well, what with this and the several lengthy periods of downtime we've suffered this year (always during or at the run-up to our major events!) we've decided to take our website business elsewhere, and are in the process of migrating to SUPANAMES Uploading 550MB of files to the new servers is a lengthy business, even with this decent broadband connection and fast PC with 1½ GB of RAM. The more important pages and illustrations will be uploaded first. For a few days during the migration a lot of the website's links won't work properly, and some pictures and web-movies will be missing. Everything will be restored to normal as soon as possible, especially updates to our letters page and news pages here and here. Once again we offer our apologies, and request your patience. ... tw, webmaster |
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Tel No: 01962 733810 Fax No: 01962 735448 |