Thank You, Andrew — Pat Dryburgh

I forgot to mention something a couple of weeks ago.

As I’m sure many of you know, my blog was featured on cssmania.com a few weeks ago, generating a much higher-than-usual visitor rate. This was really great for exposure, and I am pretty sure led to my blog being featured at smashingmagazine.com’s article “45 More Excellent Blog Designs.”

Well, the massive spike in traffic put, as you can probably guess, a huge dent in my bandwidth, so much so that by February 21st I had gone over my limit of 1 GB/month.

Now, I have to tell you something about my web hosting.

A few years ago I was just starting out building websites, primarily for my band. Back in those days, there were several web hosting companies that provided free, ad-free hosting. However, very quickly into my web designing journey, these started phasing out their ad-free services. This forced me to make a decision: deal with the ads, or somehow find a way to afford web hosting (I was in high school at the time, and all my money went to cafeteria food and guitars).

I posted my situation on a website called christian-web-masters.com, an online community of Christian graphic designers. A user by the name of Nexonen (Andrew) had a small web hosting company he and a friend had started over in the UK. He offered to give me 10 MB of space, with 500 MB of monthly bandwidth, all for free. I was so blessed to receive this offer, and set up my site on his server.

Over the years, every time I had a technical problem, or needed any support of any kind, Andrew was always courteous and helpful. After a year or so, I had run out of space (we hosted mp3’s on our site back in those days), and Andrew bumped me up first to 20 MB, and eventually 50 MB of space. He also increased my bandwidth to 1 GB/month, which really helped out a lot.

When I first began my blog, the only people who read it were friends and a few people who found their way through Google or other searches. However, this quickly changed when my blog started being featured on several different sites, including CSS Mania and Smashing Magazine. Very quickly, my 1 GB of bandwidth was no longer sufficient for my site.

I sent Andrew a quick message asking if there was anything he could do to help. He was not sure whether he was even going to continue in the web hosting business, so I knew that this may be the last straw before my free hosting was up.

However, to my great surprise, Andrew increased my monthly bandwidth to 20 GB/month, perfect for the increase in traffic and readership. I was so blessed to have someone who was able to provide for me in this way, and do so quickly and efficiently. My site was down for a total of about 5 hours, which was only because I didn’t find out until about 4 hours in that I had even been featured.

So, all of this to say that there are some really great people in the world, and Andrew, my friend from the UK, is one of them.

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