A cool thing, and an anxiety-causing thing

A few things are worthy of me writing about.

The cool thing first: last night I was up in Melbourne to see a fringe festival show thing - the thing in question was a recitation of the epic poem Beowulf, in a working blacksmith's forge. Accompanied by harp music and with mulled wine and mulled mead served (I opted for the mead). It felt EXTREMELY cool and feels like the way you're supposed to experience Beowulf! So that was fun.

Now we come to the thing that's stressing me out. For some reason, the past couple of days I have been getting massive amounts of bandwidth usage on the zine.milliesquilly.com subdomain, like multiple gigabytes a day which has the potential to burn through my quota. Only on that subdomain, but like I have no idea where it's coming from and I'm not entirely sure how to tell. And like that's the same hosting account that runs this blog and my email and such so I really don't want to like have whatever this is take that down.

For the short term I've rehosted my zine on neocities and replaced the site with a redirect there, we'll see if that quells the bandwidth tides. I'm just redirecting by putting stuff in the .htaccess file on my hosting so it's possible that it'll still be hitting bandwidth stuff weirdly depending what's actually happening here so I guess I'll have to monitor over the next few days.

Other options:

• use my domain provider's redirect options, so as not to hit my hosting at all
• up my quota on my web host (I'd rather not have to do this as I'm currently on a very cheap grandfathered in plan, and like yeah it still won't cost much but it annoys me)
• I think I saw cloudflare has a free plan? Is that something that would help here?
• figure out where the traffic is coming from and how to stop it (I don't know where to start here)

I guess I'll see if the redirect fixes things - the bandwidth usage I can see from my hosting provider seems to have a few days' lag so I'll keep checking in. And I know neocities has some basic analytics like hit counts and such so I'll see if they show anything.

If you're internetty or computery and have any ideas please let me know. Or if you're for some reason running a bot that's scraping all of my zines and it's gone a bit haywire please turn that bot off.