Why we were off line today - from the editor

As a good deal of you regular readers to barganews noticed, yes we have been off line for most of the day. It was not a technical failure, it was not a virus attack, it was not even our fault... in fact, if anything, it was all your fault!

There have been a few decisive changes on barganews recently; the updates happening now 3 or 4 times a day, the new super duper whistles and bells calendar, the forums, the blogs coming in from other places on the net and above all the fact that all the articles are interactive with the chance for you to add comments to every article published. All this has meant a surge of interest.

We now have a regular readership of 3000 a day. At some point in August we will reach the 2 million visitors to barganews since January 1st 2000.
The project to build an archive of stories about Barga is continuing. Nothing is thrown away. Every single story, image or sound that we have published over the years is still available on the internet (there is the Google search engine on the front page which will search not just on the net but inside barganews itself.... give it a try) All this data and traffic has been mounting up to make barganews one of the largest sites in Italy, some of the figures are now astronomical... barganews now occupies a staggering 3.5 GB of space on the servers for instance ...and there is our problem. Up until now we had a contract with our servers, which allowed us up to 10 GB's of traffic a month. We went through the 10 GB of traffic in less than 3 weeks this month and so the screens were shut off. We are now in the process of re-negotiating our contract and seeing if we can increase our bandwidth to 15 GB's a month in an attempt to keep up with all this interest in Barga.

I am sorry that the screens went blank for a day. I hope it will not happen again but in a strange kind of way it could be attributed to our success. Thank you people for making this such a successful site.

ciao keane