13 May 2011

The untimely demise of RadioWave

For the past month, I've been struggling with keeping RadioWave up based on complaints from the web hosting company, Lunarpages. I'm on a shared hosting server that's gone up from hosting ~300 sites a couple of years ago to >500 now. In the same time RadioWave has grown from ~5,000 hits/day to ~15,000. After the initial complaints, I moved the databases to a non-Lunarpages server. That helped for two weeks, but earlier today Lunarpages finally took RadioWave completely offline due to "extremely high traffic". The solution they offered was to purchase a dedicated server for $110/month (up from the $8/month I'm paying now). Even if I decided to dump ads on the site, it's unlikely that enough would be brought in to make it worth it.

I started RW in 2004 (a little over six years ago), and it's still a site I go to almost every day. I listen to internet radio a lot. It was also the first Java code that I wrote--some of which is looking quite hairy now. Every few months I'd get an email suggesting a new station or providing a corrected stream link, so it was nice to offer something useful to a few people. This is a busy weekend, but some of it will now be spent researching hosting companies. meh.

[ posted by sstrader on 13 May 2011 at 5:52:23 PM in Programming | tagged radiowave ]