This story begins the weekend of November 3, 1997. I am a huge fan of Comedy Central's cartoon South Park.  I'd been watching the show and surfing for South Park sites for a while when I came up with an idea for a SP page of my own.  The weekend of November 3, then, I sat down at the computer and created South Park Profundities.

I figured my site would get lots of hits because of the subject.  I was having a hard time deciding where to put my site, but since I'm a graduate student here at Radford, I finally decided to let it live on the www.runet.edu server.

Before I launched my site, I looked in our student handbook to see if there were any rules about hits per day or total web space useage. I couldn't find anything.  Needless to say, I went ahead and put my site up.

Soon I was averaging 1100 hits per day! I was ecstatic!  A few times, I even bumped the official RU site off the top of the most hit pages list for our server. It was cool.

But then one night in December, after finishing a 3 hour long final exam, I recieved an email from the server administrators that my site was being taken down because of the number of hits I was getting.

Basically, here's what happened. I was told my site was accounting for 30% of the traffic to www.runet.edu. Cool, huh?

But, I was also accused of breaking RU rules regarding network usage and U.S. laws about copyrights!!! This was NOT cool.

To help you avoid the problems I had, let me offer you some advice about setting up a page at RU.

1. Don't put up an extremely popular site at Radford University. The server is primarily educational and simply can't handle the load.
2. If you expect more than 150 hits per day, seriously look at moving your site to GeoCities or Tripod. These servers are designed for homepages and homepages only.
3. Carefully study the Client Services Web Site (currently under re-development by yours truly and Greg Norman) for what you can and cannot do. In its current state, the site is kinda hard to navi gate, but look under Documentation for what you need.

Finally, if you have an questions about what's allowed, or if you want to make sure your idea for a web site is okay, email Ed Oakes at Client Services.