Saturday 7 April 2012

Widget migration and (over)use

Most of the widgets are now migrated. We've still had over 1,000 hits on the old widgets, but most traffic went to smashingreads:

62,000 widgets served in March
12,000 in April
200 unique entries currently active (hit once or more within 24 hours) in the cache.

And not a small amount of bandwidth consumed.

This is going to be a problem. The widgets were built by a group of volunteers before christmas as a nice-to-have (and because with Amazon Select available, we thought Smashwords authors like us should get something). We're not honestly sure where to go from here.

The referral links are providing about $1 per month and the bandwidth cost is at least five times that at current levels. If we expanded the widget set to include the animation options which people ask for frequently, it would involve a server upgrade and push up costs further.

Suggestions or ideas would be welcome, since we seem to be in a bit of a corner.

We actually expected a couple of hundred a month, if that - not 62,000...