Due to a notice recieved about critical depthno longer being able to host schlabber's site.. i am working on finding yet another host.. the site will remain up while i locate another host. So keep watch for a new url Storm

Ye gods, this is getting ridiculous. Poor old Schlabber, there goes his site on another emigration. :( Good luck finding somewhere Stormrage.

Cross your and my fingers for Stormrage to find a new host :o)

At the very least, Schlabber, you deserve frequent flyer miles for this. You log more miles with that website of yours than a Lufthansa pilot ;-) Seriously though, my fingers are crossed for you. Your patience, determination and generous spirit are to be commended.

What a shame that patience, determination and generous spirits don't affect the ISPs that are bringing these limitations down on so many sites. One can't help but wonder whether it's the mass introduction of broadband or just economics on the part of many of these free hosts to bring in limitations and restrictions. I know bandwidth doesn't come cheap and many of the "free" places are finding that the revenues from advertising aren't anywhere near what they're cracked up to be, but it's getting desperate out there.

Would someone please explain to me exactly what is it about bandwidth that makes it so expensive? Does it use more electricty or something? Or is is simply a capitolistic supply/demand thing?

Yes purr... only the best for ye Herr Schlabber you're a mensch amongst men...

Purr, bandwidth is basically that strange anomalous creature that people hog when connecting to the net. The more that is used the slower everything gets. Ever logged onto a very popular site and wondered why it was slow? Or tried to download a file from somewhere and it's crawled down the line like there's lead weights attached? Basically it is charged for in good old capitalist tradition. Much like many other things when there's a money making band wagon to leap onto. So, ISPs allocate X amount to their front end servers, their file servers and their customers. When this limit is reached they have to hunt around, spend money and install new machines/software/etc to increase the demand. Currently the net isn't geared up for the massive influx of broadband connections that are arriving in people's households and because connections are getting cheaper (except in the US where it's pretty much free to many people - other than a monthly fee) and computers/connections are getting faster and faster and more people are connecting to the net, everything is starting to get hit a lot harder than ever before. This demand increases the need to spend money to upgrade equipment, install new lines etc to cope with the demand, and hey presto a vicious circle ensues. Once upon a time there were modems and modems, and bandwidth was not really too much of a problem because a modem can only suck up so much at any one time regardless of how hard you beat it with a stick. The along came ISDN and things got a bit better, but demand became higher. Then relatively cheap Cable and ADSL/DSL T1/Frame arrived and all of a sudden the file freaks/warezkittens/colleges/universities/etc could rip around the net sucking files and websites down at blinding speeds. This caused a problem where many sites weren't hosted on servers or connections that could cope with the increase in demand and the spending frenzy began. It will get worse before it gets better. I only hope it will get better. But in summary, yep. It's a capitalist thing. To make money you have to spend money and nobody likes to spend money for nothing. So to make back the money you are spending you either restrict the behaviour that occurs - such as sites that limit downloads to X megabytes per 24 hours. Java and other scripts to spoof massdownloaders and prevent people on broadband grabbing every damn file in sight at the same time or you look at where the bandwidth is being used the most and get rid of that problem. Bandwidth also can be described by some ISPs in the terms contention ration, where you share your connection to the net with other users. In some cases, like colleges you could be sharing a single DSL with as many as 50-100 other people - which means you're connection is not much better than an average modem. Certain ISPs force this sort of sharing to cut down on their costs and equalise things. Others just jump up and down, scream loudly and cut everything off. Free site providers are the worst of the bunch, because as we all know NOTHING is free. They make money through advertising revenues. People clicking on those irritating banners to go play casino games they almost never win at, or buy products they don't really need. Unfortunately this manic banner/pop-up/spare window/ads all over policy has proved unprofitable and unproductive (which almost anyone could have told them from the beginning). Remote file linking is one of the ways to avoid free site banner ads, script windows and pop ups. But direct linking does not subject people to advertising and there's no revenue from it. The answer... Prevent direct linking. All in all it's a mess, a mess that will take quite a bit to sort out. Even pay to use sites (like the ones I have in the UK) either have bandwidth limits (amount downloaded per 24 hrs from a site) or other policies in place that can result in your connection being cut for "abuse". In France some ISPs limit the upload/download amounts to a certain size in megabytes before either your connection is no longer useful or they charge you for the privalege. Something that's starting to be used by UK cable companies. For instance one that's starting on my little rock is limiting ul/dl to 250mb per week. Well, I far exceed that in a week just browsing the net and searching for software/games updates. One of my websites thundered past the 1 gigabyte level with one of Snowsultan's textures thankfully the ISP is reasonable and understood that this was not going to be a permanent situation and that demand would fade. All in all bandwidth demands currently exceeds the available supply by quite a large fraction. So what is bandwidth? In a nutshell, it's the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. It is usually talked about in terms of bits per second (bps). Although in the mainstream it's measured in how much informaion arrives and how quickly. All meaning that more bandwidth means greater speeds, less means slower speeds. If you look at the internet as a real Information "Highway" you can look at it in a way that only a certain number of vehicles can travel along it without problem. The more vehicles that join the highway means you end up with slower moving vehicles. At peak hours (rush hour) you can get traffic jams where nothing moves except at a very slow crawl. Some people make the mistake of thinking that if everything is slow the answer is to get a faster connection. However this is a falacy... it is not the faster connection that solves the problem because there are many other factors that must be considered (some of which I mentioned above.) And if all that didn't confuse you could you explain it all to me because my brain just went into meltdown.

I think you hurt my brain too. ;] But you managed what looked like a pretty concise explanation before you did. Sorry to hear that, Stormrage, Schlabber. You guys and the Dreamspinners have had way too many personal site moves in the last few months.