About ten days ago, I wrote about a bandwidth disaster that my records and the hosting provider's information indicated could cost thousands of dollars -- possibly as much as $15,000.I got the good news today: it'll cost me nada. Nothing. Zip. You heard me! Hurray! The reason: the provider drops the busiest hours of the month to the 95th percentile; this eliminates any weird spikes and doesn't penalize you for limited craziness. Because we halted the downloads soon enough, even though we served out 250 Gb of data over 36 hours and satured a 100 Mbps Internet pipe for nearly two hours, our 95th percentile utilization was only 0.2 Mbps. Whew. I've been holding my breath for 10 days. Meanwhile, kind souls donated nearly $1,800 to help defray the bill. I'd already promised to donate the remainder, if any, to Project Gutenberg. I've now emailed all donors giving them the chance to back out, since the bill is zero; I'll be adding some of my own money to that donation as gratitude for the Internet's generosity. I'm also writing a couple of articles about the panic attack and some ideas for better coping with excessive limited bandwidth needs.

Glenn Fleishman writes words about things

turning tech mumbo-jumbo into tasty, readable gumbo