By most measures, increasing your bandwidth ought to be a good thing. I’m not talking about internet speeds here, although that’s probably the key topic associated with the term. I’m talking about taking on activities. Upping your bandwidth, generally, would mean you’re taking on more tasks. You get more stuff done faster or, as they say in start-up-land, “You’re killing it!!!”. Good times… until it isn’t.

When you purchase a domain name, for example OCRhero.com, a good domain service provider will give you some options for your TTL (Time To Live) for when you update your DNS entries. This is the step that you or your techie friend partakes in when you move from your crappy website URL to your pretty one. Usually, the time selection for your nameserver updates are broken down into these preset intervals: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, etc. And, usually, those will suffice. Oftentimes, I set mine to 1 minute, in case I need my site up right away. But really, I could just go with one day and I’d be fine, and that’s where your bandwidth comes in.

There are so many things I could work on improving on some of my web-related projects that, with a high bandwidth, would result in slowing everything else down to a crawl. So I do the opposite: I lower my bandwidth and focus on my aggregate results. I could add commenting to this site, but that’s just another can of worms I don’t want to deal with right now. My stats provide me with enough data to see if my immediate decisions are right or wrong. And like my internet connection (Comcast, anyone?), my bandwidth fluctuates. It’s never one or the other all the time but, on occasion, it’s a good thing to lower it.