A rant on .mac bandwidth - somefoolwitha.com

Update: wow, were Apple reading my site? ;-)

Full .Mac members now get 10 GB of combined iDisk and email storage, which you can allocate as you wish. Family Pack master accounts also get 10 GB, while Family Pack sub-accounts get 2.5 GB each. The data transfer limit has been raised to 100 GB per month for full members and Family Pack master accounts, and 25 GB for Family Pack sub-accounts.

Ever since I've had my .mac account I've used it to basically throw files up there that I don't want impacting an my hosted bandwidth (mp3s, movies, zips and alike) and which are generally removed within a few weeks or so and are usually for specific people. As such there's usually not a lot on there and I do regularly have a clear out, which is why Im currently only using 331mb of a possible 1009mb on my .mac account, 95% of which can be accounted for by my recent uploads of Fawcett Open Mic mp3s.

So what's my beef? .mac has a seemingly reasonable bandwidth limit of 5gb every half a month so that is basically 10gb a month. Well, I have from time-to-time got warnings of imminent bandwidth limits from Apple about my .mac account but I had yet to actually cross this boundary. Well now I have.

I can only assume that the culprit for this is the open mic mp3s but more specifically Google-bots or Whoever-bots slurping these mp3s and eating up my bandwidth as from what I can see on my site stats the actual hits on the pages linking to the mp3s are no where near enough to use 5gb in a matter of days. The thing is, there is no itemised specific statistics, just a month-by-month listing of bandwidth usage. Not very useful if you would like to find out which files are eating all the bandwidth and from where.

So if you're trying to get those mp3 I'm afraid you'll have to wait until the 16th or the 1st of the month and then rush in there. In the mean-time I guess I need to go on the hunt for somewhere to host these files if it becomes a long-term thing. Amazon S3 looks interesting (cheers Brendan) but is probably overkill for my purposes so a free alternative would be a nice option if anyone has any suggestions. We are currently considering making it a regular podcast so a free podcast hoster might be appropriate, or even the dreaded MySpace!