You know that websites are hosted on a server yeah? And you get that, when a surfer clicks on a web page, the page is sent from the server to the person’s browser, and that the ‘sending’ uses up maybe 80 – 200KB of data bandwidth? (Y’know, web pages are computer files, and files have a certain size measured in Kilobytes [KB].)

Well, with all the extra people searching for Self-Injury Awareness Day and self-injury information, LifeSIGNS has had loads more visitors than usual! In fact, hits are up by about 40% over January’s statistics – we’ve had so many extra visitors in February that, just now, as we approach SIAD (1st March) our little server is beginning to struggle under the weight of demand!

We often deliver nearly a Gigabyte of web pages each and every day, but throughout February, we’ve been having loads of days that consistently require a Gigabyte of bandwidth or more each day! Just to put that in perspective, A Gigabyte is about a thousand Megabytes, and you know how many files you can get on a Megabyte don’t you? (A Megabyte is about a thousand Kilobytes).

So, at the moment, it’s as if our little server is delivering 8,500 MP3s a month – that’s how much data is being served to our visitors.

Of course, our little server has to look after a lot of the LifeSIGNS services, we’ve always kept it busy; it makes our Message Board work, manages our large Newsletter Mailing List, and looks after our main website and all the videos, documents and art that our site offers. So it’s kept pretty busy.

I’m happy to pay for our server, and happy to look after the little fella, it’s my contribution to the LifeSIGNS voluntary organisation.

If you’d like to help me pay for future upgrades to our little server, (who, bless it, is under some stress) then please make a donation to LifeSIGNS and use the ‘note’ section to say “for the little server” :)

Wedge