Something interesting happened a couple of days ago. Well, interesting for my sad life. I was doing my usual round of bullshit checks -- e-mail, Fe linkers, other 'blogs, and 'blog traffic. When I got to Sitemeter for my Sailor Schoolgirl site, I saw the following number under the today's visits stat: 127,000. That's not a typo. Sometime fairly early in the morning, I got a link from somewhere, and traffic just went berserk. It looks like if you get too many hits on a site that's image-intensive, Angelfire will shut it down. That is, unless if it was just the high traffic that caused it to catch someone's eye at Angefire and they killed it for other reasons. Anyway, it's just that third index that got shitcanned; everything else is still up and running.

I don't know for sure what happened, since Sitemeter's free service only shows the last 100 hits, and the other pages generate enough traffic that the surge was long gone in the logs before I checked it. Right now my best guess is that it was due to the fact that my defunct page is one of the top search results if you Google (whether via regular Google or image Google) for "hoshino aki," an apparently popular model who has driven a lot of the traffic to that site.

As I type, I'm re-uploading index three to a new site, but who knows if I'll eventually end up in the 127,000 bucket again. So now, I'm thinking if I want to continue this Japanese hottie goodness, I should really look into getting an actual hosted site somewhere. I've been mulling this for quite some time now, but being me, it hasn't gone anywhere yet, assuming it ever does. And either way I go, I also need to mix in some advertising -- even though it may not have really done anything, I'm kicking myself for not having set it up before 127,000 happened.

In terms of hosting, I'm looking for something cheap which at the same time gives me decent bandwidth allocations. You know, I want everything for nothing. I'd like to keep doing this site since it seems like it's serving a purpose, even if that purpose is just helping other guys jerk off. Hey, I'm fine with that -- I know what a pain in the ass it is to find sailor girl pictures. But I'm not that into providing this public service, not to the point where I'll shell out too much, especially given the, ah, financial climate over here. Some of the lower-cost options I've come across are Lunarpages, Doteasy, and LiveRack. I need to look into those more, though, to read the fine print. Anyone out there have any suggestions for decent hosting solutions?