Stats.
This blog takes up about 8% of the total amount of visits (36000 visits a month) to poorbuthappy.com (which contains other websites of mine like the Colombia website, of which the discussion pages take over 30% of the hits to this domain). Search engines bring about 15.000 referrers a month (mostly Google, October 2002 stats), news aggregators (RSS) bring about 1000 referrers a month (and growing). I removed all pictures from my Colombia site beginning this year and optimized my pages because I hit my bandwidth limit (3 gig a month), but now I am almost hitting it again. The ease blog is responsible for half a gig a month. I don't want to make the page shorter because I think that reduces the value (I like long blogs). Some optimization should keep extra costs off for another few months, but then what? I will have to pay about $450 a year extra. I am looking for cheaper alternatives and bandwidth optimization techniques.