Saint Aardvark's Journal: Noooo!

Got an email from my ISP saying they've noticed that our bandwidth usage is "substantially more than the average Internet user", and asking (ie, telling) us to contact them ASAP.

Not sure what this would be about. I mean, yes, I am hosting a bunch of websites here in strict contravention of their AUP...but a quick look at MRTG shows that we simply can't be doing that much traffic: 2.5GB or so last month for the web, and maybe another GB for email, DNS, and whatnot. We don't do filesharing, so that's out. I've downloaded some ISOs and such, but no more than usual -- less, in fact. So what the hell?

As a result, I'm looking at virtual server hosting, just in case. If anyone has any recommendations or war stories, please drop a line.

Roll your own

[Alioth]

The only way to do it is to roll your own!

I have a server from ServerMatrix, and it runs several Xen Linux instances. Extremely stable. I just asked ServerMatrix to only put a 10GB root partition on the machine and nothing else (2 x 40GB IDE drives) and I partitioned the rest so I didn't have to use a filesystem backed filesystem.

I feel for you if the ISP thinks 3GB a month is 'excessive'. That's not even a Fedora Core 4 download. Any geek will use more bandwidth than the average Internet user - the avera

run don't walk to the nearest competitor!

[lithron]

I routinely download in excess of 100 GB a month [1] from my DSL line. If your cable company thinks that 10 GB or less a month is excessive and that they need to talk to you about it, then tell them you'd like to cancel your service.

[1] Figures gathered from Giganews.com's control panel.

Thought about these guys

[nizo]

I haven't actually used em, but I am itching to work on a few open source projects just to get a discount ($45/month) from these guys [johncompanies.com]. Might be worth a look.