Today is Day 9 of the Total Lockdown in India, and Day 12 of a Lockdown in Mizoram.
I am extremely overwhelmed to see the number of shares my previous post got, not just among our Mizo community but outside the state as well, and words can't express enough to describe how much I appreciate you all for that.
There are more than 80K unique visitors to that particular post as of now, and over 150 comments, which are not the usual BOT generated "looking for hot sexy escorts nearby?" spam comments that I usually get on my blog. :D
I have read each and every single comment, and I love them all. However due to the sheer volume of comments and the outdated blog interface, I simply cannot reply to each and every single comment, so I really hope you forgive me for that. But I truly appreciate all of them, and if there was a "react" button, I would have heart emoji'd every single comment.
I also thank all the news and media persons who had contacted me, and I just want to make it clear that all the posts I have written about the lockdown in Mizoram (along with future posts) are all for public usage. The more people can read about them, the better for us. Feel free to use any of the images or information for your own reproduction.
Having 80K visits in just 2 days certainly puts a lot of pressure on what I'm planning to write next, lolz. Those who visit my blog regularly will know that I just write random stuff like this all the time, but to those who visited my blog for the first time, I really hope I don't disappoint you by telling you that I'll take some more time to research and collect pictures to post something like that again…
But I am definitely planning to write more positive things about Mizoram that you would want to share with your friends in the coming days. I'll just need some more time to do that. Meanwhile, it's back to the usual updates for now.
Here's one confession though. My friends in our "Mizo Bloggers" WhatsAppp group already know about this, but thought I'll just share it with you all - even though I was super excited about getting so many visits on my blog for the past three days, I was actually in paranoid mode!
Yup, since yesterday afternoon, I was extremely anxious, and I couldn't even sleep properly last night. And the reason for that is because of the same high visit count!
Since I want to give people who visit my blog a great experience, I do not use the in-built free image hosting service. Instead, I host all the images of my blog at my own personal AWS server. There are many advantages to that, like faster loading, better optimization, high-resolution option, simpler control panel etc etc., but I won't bore you with all the technical aspects.
The disadvantage is, I get charged for all that bandwidth usage. I usually get around 2K visits for every new blog post I write, so my monthly bandwidth usage comes to around $2 - $5. And that's ok, you know, that's the price I pay for entertaining you all, and I am fine with that.
Now… (you're starting to see where I'm going? :D ), now, after I had published my previous blog post, people started sharing it and it started going viral. I was initially very excited. It quickly crossed the average 2K visit mark in less than an hour! I was like, whoah. And then soon it reached 10K. Man, I was in seventh heaven.
But then, it reached 20K, 30K, 40K, 50K, and I was starting to panic!!!
The first thought that came into my mind was, "Oh oh… my bandwidth usage!" Because the particular post people were all visiting not only had a lot of images, but they were all high resolution images!
I checked my AWS dashboard immediately, but it freaking takes 24 hours to refresh, and so my current bandwidth usage was still happily sitting at the $3 mark only. Lolz.
Last night, I checked my dashboard again. The bandwidth usage had gone wayyyyyy up, just as I feared! Like a protruding Antila mansion surrounded by the slum areas of Mumbai. This is the latest bandwidth usage chart as of today:
As you can see from the chart above, my monthly usage was being maintained at a steady $2 - $5 for a long time, and then suddenly in just two days, it shot past the $40 mark! And that $40 is just the raw data transfer cost, apart from that there are various service charges, storage charges, GST etc., and my bill for the month of March came to 76 US Dollars!!!!!
Man… I was just… laughing and crying at the same time :D
I was already thinking what all I could have bought instead with that $76, imagine how many "kuhva hring" I can buy during these hard times when it is not available anywhere! Damnnnnn.
And so I spent the whole day today discussing with my techie friends on what to do, and finally, I moved all the images of that post to imgur, a free image hosting site, and re-linked all the html codes again. Now if you visit that particular post again, you will notice that all the images are now taking a much longer time to load, and they will be of lower resolution as well.
I feel bad doing that, but since I'm not earning anything from my blog, I had to do that, otherwise I can no longer afford to blog anymore, lolz. I had already deactivated all advertisements on my blog a long time ago because I blog out of passion and not because of the money.
And so, those are the things that had been going on with me for the past 2 days. For the rest of this month, I'll be hosting all my new blog update images on imgur only, I dare not touch AWS again for the time being, lolz. And from tomorrow onward, I will get back to writing relevant topics again about the ongoing lockdown. So until my next post then everyone, cheers.
