Unchartable refreshes

What the heck.

Take a look at this report on the bandwidth used by Modern Evil for the month of July (partial):

You may notice something strange about the data there. I sure did. Especially in the larger context you can see here:

Do you see that?

How about that?

So I went to my webstats interface with 1&1 to see if maybe I got linked to by some major site, or maybe I had 250,000 new readers all of a sudden. No big new referrer; the biggest referrer is still google, with around 3.5k referrals for the month. In fact, not a lot of new readers. The thing says that there were almost 3 million page views, but just the normal average of 1200 “unique visitors” for yesterday, the 30th. It averages it out to tell me that each visitor loaded around 2500 pages yesterday. 90% of them the main page at http://www.modernevil.com/index.php.

Now, I know there was a problem with the site yesterday, but did you have to refresh the main page three million times?

Sigh.

I only pay $1 per Gb beyond 5/month, last I checked, so your little 3million page views in one day hasn’t exactly broken the bank. But I’m waiting impatiently for midnight to see whether today has gone insane as well. My website doesn’t bring in $7 a day, a week, a month… most months anyway. So if you cost me another $7 tomorrow I’m deleting the site for a while.

That 326Mb FTP the day before yesterday is me downloading the entire site. I did it just before deleting twelve sections from Modern Evil, in case I needed to put them back or something. So no worries. If I do have to take the site down (ostensibly because someone is attacking it) for a while, it won’t all be lost.

Now, on the other hand, if you could all work together, tell 250 of your friends each about the site, and actually get that volume of traffic in a reasonable distribution, I’d be more than happy about it. I’d be able to make money from advertising.