Why I Love North America: Statistics, Web Hosting and More

I love North America, as a continent, because they comprise 64% of the readership for this blog. Asia is second at 22% with Europe following at 7%. I miss Africa

USA alone comprises 58% of my worldwide traffic. India is second at 12%.

Update: Ignore the above graphs. I realized the statistics provided were for a small window of time and not aggregate statistics. In other words they are meaningless. For example now it shows Europe with 47% readership share and Africa too present. The country readership stats are likewise calculated for a small window of time and hence meaningless. Ouch!

I realized what Sitemeter does is provide statistics on a small sized (unspecified length) rotating log. What good does it do?

Web Hosting Uptime
This weekend there may be a slight disruption of service as I suddenly ran out of my measly 20GB bandwidth allocation and moving over to 75GB, same webhost but different plan - October Special. What I enjoy with westhost is their VPS - Virtual Private Server. It gives me full control over my environment at shared hosting prices. I have my own Apache server, mail server and can even run my own application servers. I can restart the environment when I choose, full configurability etc. Flexibility comes at a cost. Whereas I can get a Site5 account with similar specification in their MultiSite Express package (6GB storage, 75GB bandwidth, dedicated IP address, ssh, ftp, unlimited domain parking etc.) for 97$ a year, WestHost costs $203 a year (on a yearly package) with their October Special package.

IMHO the price differential is worth the full control over my environment with VPS. Plus I have been a satisfied WestHost customer from 1998. Your mileage may vary.

So for now no switching web hosting providers. I will soon provide a detailed list of plans and pricing I considered before switching and why I decided to stick on.