Blog Relations

Bluehost continues to baffle me. A month ago, I offered to pay, as per their website, for more bandwidth as our Storynory podcast now exceeds the monthly 250 gig allowance of transfer. They wrote back saying that I couldn’t buy bandwidth, as they made a loss on selling it. They explained that our website would go down before the end of the month and wished me to “have a good day.” I spent a weekend transferring all our audio to the internet archive, and recently have put the latest episodes on Libsyn. Now Bluehost writes to me and customers saying:

Dear Bluehost Customer!

We are writing you today to tell about some good news regarding your
Bluehost account. Starting May 1st Bluehost will be offering 15 Gigs
of disk space, and 400 Gigs of data transfer. As always when these
upgrades occur you aren’t charged a thing.

Well this is a generous offer, but I still can’t quite understand how they can’t afford to sell us more bandwidth but they can afford to give us more. The speed of downloads from Bluehost is certainly better than the alternatives we’ve been using. The internet is a strange and wonderful place. I don’t want to be ungrateful, so thank you Bluehost.

Meanwhile Libsyn -who provide unlimited transfer – have announced that 45 million people listen to podcasts hosted on their services:

We think it’s safe to say more then 45 million people listened to and watched podcasts off the Libsyn network in the first quarter of 2006. That is approximately a 200% increase from Q4 2005 (about 25 million).

That’s a Hell of a lot of low-cost bandwidth.