The essential China blog ESWN is down, because its server's bandwidth limitations have been exceeded. In other words, too many people are reading the website, and the server can't handle the traffic.

At last! The English reading world is interested enough in China to blow Roland Soong's server up.

There is hope yet.

- Note: ESWN's server might be down for other reasons, but the message reads:

Error

Sorry, you have reached either a non-existent site or the site has been suspended (or deactivated) due to Disk Space and/or Bandwidth Violation / Exceeded.

UPDATE: ESWN explains, via email:

The entire ZonaEuropa.com site went offline on a few hours due to excessive disk/bandwidth usage above the contracted quota. First, can you believe that the event was triggered off not by any file stored here, but because of a log file of website activities (which is counted as part of the disk quota) on April 13, 2006? Second, this huge log file came as a result of a cardinal sin (in rudeness and lack of ethics) committed by person(s) unknown who linked directly from their page(s) to the three pictures on The Chinese Tourist Zhao Yan without citing the ESWN page itself. In other words, they could titillate a huge audience probably without any context. That is not fair.

Trying to straighten this mess out with my web hosting service (ah, yes, that would be the bunch of yahoos at Yahoo!) was living hell. Some of you might have tried to follow through to the Site Owner's page on the error message page. It says that the site owner can rectify everything by logging in and increasing my disk quota. I tried to log in and I get this error message: "Domain not found." It was Catch 22 -- my domain does not work because of a problem; to fix the problem, I have to log onto that domain, which does not work. My alternative is to send email inquiries which will go back to my Central Park Track Club email account. I had not used that account for more than a year, so the first order of business was to download more than 12,000 pieces of unread emails (spam!!!) to get to that one response. Alas, but Yahoo! never even replied. Fortunately, I still have ftp access and I had to go in and delete the offending log file. After that, it takes 24 to 48 hours for the site to return.