Personal Bytes

Damn! For those who’ve noticed that this blog along with most of my websites was down since January 28th, well, let me tell you, I’m one hell of a lazy bastard and boy George should be unleashed upon me.

Here’s why. blogaqui.com provides a button for advertising the website that bloggers may choose to exhibit or not. To make things easier, the button is stored on my own system (as in, my hosting provider). That means I’m responsible for serving it.

Everything would be fine, lest the fact that I do have monthly limits on my plan and I’ve been about to exceed them for quite some time now. Upon realizing that the issue was that button, I planned on using a free CDN like Coral. It’s quite straightforward actually. Just make a copy of the button and then put a RewriteRule that redirects that button request to the CDN. Easy pizzy.

Since I’m lazy with my own problems (funny enough, I devote more time to the other’s problems than to those of my own — I should swap priorities ASAP) I’ve been postponing this such simple task for, like, 3 months now.

Until today. The button is finally cached on Coral and it’s been served by Coral most of the times (they have a TTL of about 12 hours if I’m not mistaken) which will represent a significant drop in my traffic log.

If you’re in the same situation, don’t be a lazy bastard like me and move it to a CDN right away (or find a better plan, but using Coral is definitely cheaper).

P.S. - You don’t actually need to copy the image if you use a RewriteCond that only applies to everything but Coral CDN.