The good news is that WinCustomize's popularity continues to increase. The bad news is that we have once again reached our bandwidth limits.

Stardock, who provides the bandwidth for WinCustomize has been, since late June, sharing its own bandwidth for its services with WinCustomize. In June, WinCustomize exceeded by far the amount of bandwidth it had available to it and the site became unbearably slow. So Stardock extended WinCustomize some of its own internal bandwidth to WinCustomize to pick up the slack adn things wwent back to being fast.

As predicted, the closer we get to the Windows XP launch, the more the traffic continues to increase. When Stardock loaned us some of its own bandwidth, the caveat was that WinCustomize was expected to be able to start paying its part of the bill. That isn't to say that it would have to be profitable, just that simply put, if it wants bandwidth beyond the monthly grant Stardock provides, it has to pay for the bandwidth above and beyond that grant.

We have done some analysis on where the bandwidth has been going and it's not so much that we're just getting a lot of new users. It's that we're getting a lot of new users who visit the site and then proceed to download 100 megabytes of skins, icons and themes with their cable modems.

Today, bandwidth use has reached a point where it's now affecting Stardock's own internal servers. Paying customers of Object Desktop have seen their download speeds drop because WinCustomize has been eating into that bandwidth. Stardock's own home page has been affected as well.

The word from Stardock's IT and sales staff to me today is basically the WinCustomize is likely negatively affecting Stardock's own ability to support customers and reach new customers because of the performance hit.

So what do we do? The temporary solution that we're hoping to implement today is as follows:

During peek hours (when bandwidth is maximized) the IT team will be able to flip a switch that will only allow X number of connects on WinCustomize at once. That will effectively keep WinCustomize from using bandwidth beyond its grant.

However, users with apprentice access or higher or users whose email addresses here are in the Stardock database as a customer will be able to continue to download skins/icons/themes using Stardock's extended bandwidth given to this site. In other words, customers and users who have gained higher access over the months will be unaffected as Stardock will be providing to them its own internal bandwidth to use WinCustomize. Users who have purchased shirts, hats, CDs from WinCustomize also count as a customer.

It's not a perfect solution and it's one we had to implement quickly and hopefully won't be required to be used very often (most of the time, it's not going to even be a problem). One problem, for instance, is that many users here probably have an email address here that is different than the email address they may have used when they purchased Object Desktop or WindowBlinds. We will be working on this so that users can link their accounts together seamlessly.

Another problem is one of fairness since a user with say Apprentice access is unaffected even if they aren't in our database. All we can say to this is that we will try our best to be as fair as possible.

Right now, the options present to us is to turn OFF the skin libraries during peek hours for everyone or to turn it OFF for some people. We are currently choosing to turn it OFF just for most people to keep bandwidth under control.

Over time, we hope to make the system ore sophisticated so that users will be able to download 10 megabytes without being affected (so that casual visitors aren't affected by the policy). We may be able to put this in right away in fact.

Some libraries will be unaffected by this - Dashboard and Coolplayer since this is the official website for those apps and they aren't using much bandwidth. The bandwidth eating sections are DesktopX, Wallpapers, and WindowBlinds mostly.

We hope you understand the necesity of this move and we hope it is an infrequent occurence (or that at the very least we figure out a way to resolve it more seamlessly).

As I mentioned above, the primary problem we're running into is that we're getting 650,000 unique people visiting and severla thousand of them each month are downloading >50 megabytes per month in skins/icons/themes without having registered the software they're downloading the things for not have helped support the site with buying a CD (if you're going to download 300 megs of skins from here, buy the CD!).

Thanks for your understanding.