Slow Down, You're Hurting Me

For a videogame junkie like myself, the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo is like having an extra Christmas in May. This year's showings have been particularly yummy to boot, with huge sequels like Half-Life 2, Doom 3, KOTOR 2, Prince of Persia 2 and Halo 2, a new generation of portable gaming hardware in Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS, booth babes, and a whole range of other weird and wonderful games-related stuff. I tried to do my part for the cause by hosting the Xbox trailers for Doom 3 on Hamfisted, but after transferring 27 gigabytes of data in less than 24 hours, I had to yank the files. I had expected a big response, but the actual number (which is actually more than my entire monthly transfer allowance) was a bit frightening. After all, blowing that limit ends up costing me money.

My shock and awe was mostly offset by the warm fuzzy feeling that my hosting provider, www.pair.com, can really haul ass when I need it to. I'm yet to survive a direct Slashdot Effect blast, but hurling an amount of data equivalent to my laptop's entire hard drive around the world in less than a day feels like I'm with a decent hosting outfit. Pair.com are expensive (US$30/month for the Webmaster plan that I use) but their network, features, support and setup have been totally professional.