Well, I take this as a mixed message. I received the following email from the .Mac account administrators today:
This means several things:
- My published enhanced podcasts (most recently by Dr. David Berliner) must be fairly popular. (The mp3 version is not hosted by .Mac and is still available.)
- Folks wanting to download that enhanced podcast or any of the others (I’ve just posted 3 and 1 video podcast to my iWeb site) will need to wait till after the 16th of the month.
- I may have to consider paying for more bandwidth and storage space on .Mac.
- Clearly this proves that when you are posting relatively large podcast files, bandwidth consumption can go up quickly!
This is the first month I’ve ever used up my quota of bandwidth on .Mac:
Fears (and really hopes, I guess) of high bandwidth consumption due to podcasting have partly motivated me to publish almost all my mp3 version podcasts to the Internet Archive, which hosts the files for free. Since I have wanted to both use and learn about iWeb’s publication to the Internet’s features, however, I have posted my enhanced podcasts to my .Mac account, that is a “standard” consumer account.
I am glad that folks are finding some of the content I’ve put online worthwhile and interesting enough to download, but of course it is problematic that now (till the 16th of the month when the bandwidth consumption meter apparently gets reset) my iWeb site is blocked. That is one reason I chose POWWEB when searching for a WordPress blog host, because they permit (currently) 400 GB of transfer per month. That’s a lot, and up from the 200 GB of transfer they allowed when I signed up originally.
I have free Webalizer stats turned on for my POWWEB account which hosts this Speed of Creativity blog, and it shows that I have never gotten over 7 GB of monthly transfer:
The peak in March was due to downloads of podcasts I had posted to my own POWWEB account back in November and October of 2005. I tried to post an enhanced podcast directly to my POWWEB account but ran into trouble because of the server not recognizing the m4a (enhanced podcast) file format. I didn’t work long to troubleshoot it… I may work out that problem and then repost my enhanced podcasts to my POWWEB account instead of my .Mac account, I’m not sure. At least people can wait till the bandwidth meter resets if they want to download those enhanced podcasts… my apologies if you are one of the people trying to grab those files and are unable to do so! When I visit my iWeb site tonight, I can see the text and graphics, but the enhanced podcasts appear to be blocked from downloading.