An email from Supanames, the company who host this website and its diary.
Dear Customer,
Our engineers have recently conducted a performance audit of the server hosting your website dickonedwards.co.uk. During this work they identified that dickonedwards.co.uk is one of the top users of server resources…
How wonderful! I’m one of their ‘top users’! Are they going to give me a medal, an award, a reward, perhaps?
… and contributes significantly to the loading of the server, impacting on speed. We’re writing to politely ask that you upgrade to a more appropriate SupaNames hosting package designed to meet your website’s power and resource requirements. We’d like to help by giving you an instant £15 discount off selected hosting upgrades or £50 off a Semi Dedicated server… As you may be aware the terms and conditions of our packages state that we can suspend any website using too many server resources, and we’re keen to avoid having to suspend your website in order to ensure good service performance for other users. By upgrading now you can avoid this happening.
If you sell over 100,000 records a month, your record label showers you with gold discs.
If your novel sells over 100,000 copies a month, it’s bigger than The Da Vinci Code (which currently pegs out at a mere 60,000).
If your website gets over 100,000 hits a month, your hosting company asks you for more money to handle the extra resources.
Okay, so the comparison is shudderingly naive, but you get the general idea where my ranting mind is at tonight.
The Supanames tariff I currently use is commendably cheap and allows an ‘unlimited bandwidth’, as long as I don’t use the service for promoting audio and video downloads. But clearly even ‘unlimited’ has a limit.
I’ve hastily moved a few photos from recent entries to ImageBucket, in the hope of alleviating the burden on the Dickonedwards.co.uk servers. Fingers crossed that brings down the bytes a little. It’s partly my fault for indulging myself with too many photos and vidcaps lately.
What irks me is that whether I like it or not, I have to admit to being a far more successful public diarist than I am a songwriter or recording artist (the things I’m meant to have been successful at), at least to date. While I’m obviously grateful for having the readership, it’s frustrating that not only do I fail to receive a penny for this so-called achievement, but I have to pay for being allegedly entertaining on a mass level. It’s assumed that I can somehow find the money elsewhere. Talk about negative equity.
Fair enough if my diary was a commercial concern. But it isn’t. It’s just me. Hosting garish pop-up display ads is out of the question. But I do need a sponsor. Or something else to point to that gives me an income.
The current trend for giving writers of popular blogs a book deal appears to have amusingly passed me by. Well, I don’t want to make this diary into a book per se, but I do want to have a few books out there between now and the grave. It’s about time I sent those chapters off. There’s a table in Waterstones marked ‘Quirky Fiction’. It includes The Complete Saki alongside a smattering of modern works. I looked at it and thought, for once in my life I know where I want to be. So get on with it and stop moaning! cries the readership.
Till then, I’m forever painting Tom Sawyer’s fence. I don’t mind that so much: I’m living a penurious but pleasant existence getting by on my wits and the long-suffering kindness of friends and relations. But paying Mr Sawyer more money, for doing a job too well, imbues the concept of Performance Related Pay with a wry twist too far. And that’s coming from a Saki fan.
