Haloscan's RSS is Down

You may have come here to find out if LastHalo has indeed gone out of service. Actually no, at the mean time, Haloscan's RSS feed of latest comments, which LastHalo is depending on, is not functioning properly. Hence, LastHalo would not be able to retrieve the latest comments on your Haloscan account.

Please wait a few moments, with the efficiency of Haloscan team, it would be functioning again.

As for the increasing hosting cost of LastHalo, I currently have a plan in mind. As LastHalo hasn't been updated for such a long time, due to my university vacation, I believe it's time for further improvements (especially presentation wise and other features), and also some bug-fixing time (especially the problem in displaying characters of foreign languages).

When I'm finally done so, I would most probably be releasing LastHalo in 2 versions. One is the basic functional version which costs nothing to be installed on your blog (in fact I'm paying for it, as I'm donating my bandwidth), another version would be the enhanced version with the extra features and configurations to make LastHalo's sidebar more suitable for your site's presentation. The latter version would require a small subscription fees.

Don't worry. I would not be charging high. My proposed fee structures would be somewhat like Haloscan's, $12 fo 12 months of premium account which should be affordable for most power users. In fact, for non-subscriptin members, they would not miss out anything on LastHalo as they will still be getting basic sweet little functional LastHalo sidebar as it is now.

Thanks everybody for your generous positive response and telling me that they would be willing to donate should LastHalo requires so. It means a lot as an encouragement to me to continue to support LastHalo. I would not be accepting any donations for now as I believe, one, it is only a temporary solution; two, I believe that LastHalo would need some improvements to be subscription-worthy.

Once again, thank you guys for your continuous support for LastHalo!

Yours,
Chua U-Zyn

Update: Haloscan's RSS and LastHalo is working fine now. Looks like the Haloscan team has just made the anchored links to each comments. LastHalo would be updated to cater for that soon.

Bandwidth Is Eating Me Up

I coded LastHalo, a free Haloscan sidebar that lists the recent comments for blogs that use Haloscan, and have it hosted on my own hosting account.



I launched it at late March, and as you can see on my screenshot, the free service is growing exponentially. Last month, the service ate up close to 10GB, and today, it's using up half a gig a day. I have never thought it could eat up so much bandwidth as all LastHalo sent out was only a few lines of code, with no image, no sound, no animation whatsoever. Imagine just that few lines of codes, eating up 10GB a month. That's massive.

Last month, LastHalo service got 2.5 million hits. Dividing by 30, that's 85k hits per day. Dividing further by 24, that's 3.5 thousands hits per HOUR! Just too bad that those hits are not actually visits to LastHalo's homepage but merely requests on the script. Hence, LastHalo's homepage has a Google PageRank of only 1.

If it keeps growing exponentially like it is now, I would be having problems affording the bandwidth for that anymore. I would be forced to upgrade my hosting account very soon if I do not want to shut LastHalo down. It would be sad to see a service grows so fast and then have to shut it down so fast too.

I would need some help, financially, in supporting the service. I would need about tens of USD per month to pay for my hosting and upgrade to a better one, not just more bandwidth, but also to a more reliable one. Current one keeps doing down every few days. I would hate to start charging for the service.

Can anyone of you suggest a good way of me getting some fund from LastHalo for me to support my increasing hosting fees?

Please drop a comment or you can email me (chua@uzyn.com).

Thanks.

Yours,
Chua U-Zyn
http://uzyn.com