This morning I got a polite but firm email from my web host.

Hawk Wings, it said, needs optimisation:

Your site attracts a lot of visitors which translates to a lot of hits and bandwidth (we’re talking about 100K hits yesterday, and 18 GB of bandwidth used in April). To compare: … In the past four days, your site has spawned almost *two times more* PHP processes than the next nine users combined, on the server. Also, your site used *four times more* time spent in running MySQL queries than then the next nine users combined.

Obviously that’s a nice problem for me to have, but not so nice for the other sites on the shared server.

I teach Ancient Greek in my day job, a skill of limited use when it comes to blog optimisation.

Luckily, Hawk Wings reader and professional web site designer Brady J Frey knew exactly what to do. He whipped through the code and without making too many rude remarks, cleaned it up and made it much more efficient.

It feels faster and leaner to me. I hope it will to TextDrive too. If not, things like the Recent Posts list and the tag cloud will start disappearing off the front page.

Personally, I can’t thank or recommend Brady highly enough. He was fantastic. The professional services that his design company dotfive offers are sure to be even better.hawk wings, textdrive, hosting, mail.app, apple mail, bandwidth, optimization, dotfive, big props to Brady Frey

You will notice (I hope) that advertising is appearing in tasteful and restrained places on Hawk Wings.

TUAW, NonStopMac and some other sites are linking to my posts, which is nice. It is also sending the bandwidth usage through the roof.

So I have to upgrade my web hosting package. So it costs more money. So the wife wants to know who is going to pay for this extravagance. So the ads appear.

You know the rest of the drill. Be nice. Click once in a while. Ease the domestic pressure. Make the Baby Jesus smile.