Well, it’s been a crazy few days around here, and many of you have probably noticed that The Simple Dollar has been intermittently offline since last Friday. Basically, The Simple Dollar has been a victim of its own success.

Here’s what happened. During the month of February, The Simple Dollar has been averaging about 23,000 page views a day, plus all of the various images you see on the site. That’s a substantial amount of traffic, especially for a blog as “young” as The Simple Dollar. Sometime Friday afternoon, my hosting provider decided that the traffic to The Simple Dollar had simply become too much for them to handle, so without much notice, they simply cut off my site. Boom. That’s it. Now, to be aware, when I started The Simple Dollar, I didn’t expect to build the level of traffic I have now for a couple of years - instead, it happened in three months.

Over the weekend, I cajoled them into putting my site back online until I can find a better hosting solution, so right now I am in the process of securing a dedicated server for The Simple Dollar. At this point, a dedicated server is plenty for serving up The Simple Dollar, but I honestly have no idea how much bigger the site can grow. I honestly have no idea where the “cap” is. I do know that the 30%-40% in weekly growth probably isn’t sustainable over the long term, but I do believe I’m going to keep growing fairly rapidly for a while.

So, this week, I’m going to be focusing on getting things set up for The Simple Dollar so this won’t happen again. What does that mean for you, the reader? This week will see fewer posts than a normal week - I’ll still be posting a few posts a day, but not at the same rate most of you are used to. I’m planning that by the end of the week I will have a dedicated server solution in place.

If you have a proposal for sponsoring my hosting in the future, I’d be interested in hearing it. Please contact me at trent at thesimpledollar dot com.