The Downside of Huge Traffic

That is sick... Still he could sell that car for tops bucks it's gorgeous

Online Marketing’s last blog post: John Chow’s Free Ebook – Worth The Price Tag?

Was that Godaddy that ripped you off? I have used them for over 1000 domain purchases but I cannot stand their webhosting. Dude write to Bob Parsons.

Funny!

I think like most people here, He had no Ideal that so many people would visit his site, otherwise he would have 1) had an unlimited plan 2) planned to monetize the site 3) resized the images before posting. Again like most people here I have an unlimited hosting plan and I could only wish for the amount of traffic that he received, the next time I decide to teach my dog a new trick I will post a video in hopes of going viral and crashing my server, but not before I get some money.... :)

As good as me for not being lucky even after such hard work.

Good problem to have ... though pain is felt in the interim, should be good for the longer term ..

A bad situation, but we someone will help him to let him tell his story with a cheap way.

He is one dedicated man to work at that car for 17 years! It's a beauty though :)

I hope he takes you up on your offer John!!!

wow.. that's massive traffic to get overcharged like that..

If I had the kind of traffic he must have had to get this hosting bill, I would have earned 10 times the cost of it and easily made $10,000 from nearly any of my sites.

Yeh If I was him I would install WP and add some ads, maybe expand his story a bit, he has the traffic why not profit from it :-)

What an opportunity to monetize his blog with all that traffic, why does he need donations?

I wonder if the $900 GoDaddy got will make up for the bad publicity?

Pretty large hosting bill, but then again did'nt he save some money the last 17 years? I must admit he build something awesome, but If he decides to build another Lamborghini (which would take him another 17 years to build) tell him to put some money away every month just to be on the safe side;-)

Enough with the jokes, awesome project man and it would be a better idea not to repair the wall but install a garage door. You never now what your thinking about building next :-)

This is interesting, i hope you all read the posts how John Chow revenue was used to sky rocket due to the Digg effect until he was banned for Digg. But after getting unbanned, he was not able to repeat the success. If not go to the old post, its a very good read. Right John :-)

I never host a website with Godaddy

Evil as always. Anyway, how come the host didn't have a bandwidth limit to stop the site when the traffic hit the line?

this is really cool! Ken nice car

Wow Lamborghini! How much is that?

Lol the photo is hilarious.. was it really taken for this topic?

wow $957/month is really big and with $8 that he can only afford is really a big problem also, why can't he moving his site to a better host and with low price? there are many better hosting with huge space and low price these days

Talk about trying to monetize your website after the fact, but really if he can afford the custom made car, does he really need assistance on his web hosting bill?

I mean that wasn't a rebuilt 1991 Honda Civic we're talking about here. You can't build luxury cars and ask for handouts at the same time.

I think the car is great! And I do think that was an underhanded thing to do on the part of his hosting company. They should have just shut his site down like they did to my other site. I may have to switch hosting companies...any recommendations?

That's unfortunate that his hosting bill was that expensive. However, I do admire Ken's dedication the his project, and going so far as to take out a wall in his house to share it with the world. I'm sure you would have been fond of his Lamborghini. Thanks for sharing his story!

Fail on his part for not monetizing that traffic. I am a little surprised that the web host didn't contact him when he was going way over the initial amount of traffic allowed, it seems really shady for a browser to not at least let him know.

Hah, I wonder what else he's got down there. Car needs a windshield too. It shows that if you do things a little differently than everyone else YOU GET ATTENTION so why everyone builds cookie cutter blogs is beyond me. Great article.

Ugh that reminds me, I hate my blogs template so much I just cut out all the graphics and left it plain like a newspaper... help!, Where's NATE!?!

Sad! He could have definitely monetized his site with advertisements and affiliate programs. He lost a lot of money from it and probably ended up losing money from his website.

One of my small sites had a tsunami of traffic the day yahoo news linked to it. My host billed me for a small fortune, but I negotiated them down to -0-. Of course, I had to upgrade to a new hosting plan for $14.95 per month. How fair is that? Very fair, I think.
Have a very happy day !!

Yea, this type of comment is always great to have on any blog...

:)

What What! Just b/c you can frontside kickflip doesn't mean you can grapeflip. Just b/c you can double frontside flip doesn't mean you can double grapeflip.

He isn't the only one to build a car inside his house. There was an episode of top gear with a guy building a racing car in his kitchen :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5ZZ7IXugno
With hosting i think he just needed to seperate the images to a free image hoster, i can't imagine the site using that much traffic without images.

there are many free hosting services online which he can try :)

That's not a real Lambo, it's a fake. Why didn't he just build the car outside in his garage?

Wow thats crazy! Sounds like his host ripped him off. I doubt he was doing 50mbit of bandwidth.

Haha, there is no wonder he has crossed his bandwidth the home page is about 5 MB because of the images!

Web hosting bills in exchange of car, the car on which he spent 17 years of his life :D that is funny.

Wow, you could've helped a lot and I'm sure a generous person like you could just send him over $1,000 :D

-Mike

imagine if he had a how-to and adsense....

Awesome car, and story. I wonder how much the car cost to make.

$957 overage, how? Typically shared hosting shuts down the site if it gets too much traffic to prevent overages, I don't see how they can legitimately charge him that much.

I hope he will reconsider and start monetizing the site now. After featuring him here, he'll probably get another traffic boost and then the Bill will come :-)

John, you ARE truly evil :-)

Hell, I'll pay for his overcharge from his hosting company if he'll give me the car. :)