Geocities Members - A Survey

Peta_Tzunami · October 8, 2001, 4:02pm

I design websites for some friends’ bands, etc. and set them up for these people on Geocities.

I’ve seen the following email from Geocities on two of the websites this week. One of the websites only has about 15 visitors a WEEK?! And except for 2 sample sound files, it has limited (and small filesize) graphics. I’m curious how it could be exceeding this limit on any regular (hourly) basis.

Dear GeoCities Member,

Congratulations, website seems to be very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic. Our records indicate that you’re using more than the allotted amount of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3 gigabytes per month (measured on an hourly basis). That means that during the past few days we had to temporarily turn your site off to keep the bandwidth within this limit.

What can I do?

Keep in mind that large files such as images and multimedia files can effect your data transfer greatly. A single web page that contains 200,000 bytes of images will only be able to be viewed about 20-25 times an hour. By keeping your file sizes and page sizes as small as possible, you can maximize the amount of page views your site can produce.

You can also upgrade your site to one of our new premium services, GeoCities Pro or GeoCities Webmaster. These packages allow for 10 and 20 gigabytes of data transfer per month, and also give you the option of purchasing unlimited data transfer so your site will always be accessible. These packages also enable you to run an ad-free site at your own
domain name (for example, domain name) AND get matching email accounts at that domain (like you@domain name.com).

For more information about our new packages…blah, blah, blah.

Oh, and I emailed them asking how I could track the byte-transfer per hour myself so I could figure out where the big drain was, since I couldn’t tell based on the site visitor statistics I can access. Surprise! I haven’t received an answer from them yet.

So…anyone (everyone) else getting these?

Omniman · October 8, 2001, 4:22pm

I haven’t gotten the letter, and I run a pretty busy company website.
Maybe it’s just the particular server you’re residing on is overflowing and they are sending generic (i.e., wrong) letters to everyone hoping some will move?

yosemite · October 8, 2001, 4:32pm

I think they’ve made a mistake. 15 visitors a week isn’t going to generate that much traffic, no matter what.

I have a pitiful little site on Geocities, I have never gotten such a message about bandwidth.

malkavia · October 8, 2001, 4:37pm

I’ve gotten this same msg on my geocities site… Which I havent updated in about 2 years and which MAYBE gets 3 hits per month.
Riiiiight.

yosemite · October 8, 2001, 8:15pm

It’s vaguely possible I got an email but deleted it before reading it. (Vaguely possible.)

But I also must mention that I have the “Plus” membership, where I pay $5 a month for no ads. Perhaps they are leaving me alone because of that. But it does look like Geocities is sending out such emails to everyone.

Cheap bastards.

sailor · October 8, 2001, 9:09pm

I have received that email regarding my web site which also has very little traffic. You just have to read it carefully to understand it:

>> 3 gigabytes per month (measured on an hourly basis).

That is 4.27 Mb/hr so, if your site had requests for 4.27 Mb in a one hour period, you exceeded the traffic quota and they denied further requests for a while. I know downloading a few photos from my website would easily exceed the limit even if the monthly traffic is low.

elfkin477 · October 9, 2001, 2:04am

I’ve gotten it twice, but I probably get 100 or so visitors a week. This is ominous, I have a feeling it’s not going to be a free site at all much longer.

Peta_Tzunami · October 10, 2001, 1:30pm

So you think they’re sending out that message every time a websites hourly download exceeds 4.27MB? Because we’ve now gotten 3 emails in 3 days for the same website. It’s kind of annoying…