This site might disappear between now and the end of the month

This site has been hit by referring robots from a couple of new (to me) sites. They’re typical gambling affiliate link sites who a desperate for anyone to visit. So I’ve given them a bit of help. Any robot referred to my site from a gambling site will be referred back to them. I was going to get them to auto-click the affiliate links, but that wouldn’t be any deterrent as the casino sites don’t lose money from robot clicking, or at least not yet.

The damage for this month has been done, a big chunk of bandwidth has gone. I’m already at the limit of what I want to pay for hosting, so when the limit is exceeded the site disappears till Feb 1. In the longer term this is going to be a problem anyway as I had my 20,000th visitor today. If visitor figures continue to rise then I could be in the same situation in March or April.

I might be looking for a new host in the future. I see that ScienceBlogs are open to applicants, but I’m not going to try for a few reasons. One is that, like Coturnix, I’m not convinced I am a science blogger. Unlike Coturnix I have the additional problem that this blog isn’t really good enough. This isn’t an attempt to fish for compliments, but rather reflects a different way of work. I strongly suspect that PZ Myers or afarensis think about something before they write. I tend to use writing as part of the thinking process. This means that I often don’t agree with what I’ve written. Additional problems are that I would be unquestionably a commercial blogger, which has knock-on effects for photos and the copyright belonging to Scienceblogs would be a problem. I mention this last one as an edited blog post here is probably to be published in Null Hypothesis, How to Discover Atlantis.

I’m wary of moving to Blogger. WordPress.com isn’t very flexible, they need the security, and I’m not convinced DailyKos or Kuro5hin are suitable places to go to. I have an account at UTI, but I don’t use it as most of my posts wouldn’t be on theme there either. I’m tempted to use all of them and have a Blogger account simply to index posts and comments.

But if this is just the result of surges at the start of the month and from two sites, it may not be an issue for a while yet.