If I got paid by website hits instead of per-event work that I do (at a 10th of a cent per hit), I could have retired comfortably last year. One of the websites I contribute content to gets over 500K hits on average daily, and reaches over 2M during live events. That's just one of three sites that I work with/for. They all use multiple server systems because they have to, and even then, where you might get sent to each time isn't the same place the next guy gets sent to. It looks the same, but it might not be as current as the info on another server.

Mike's problem isn't with capacity, it is with allowable access to his space, and an apparently blatant attack on that web space. His service provider should have made the cap on his space enforceable when it was breached, i.e., any hits beyond his allowable bandwidth should have been met with an error page.

Unlimited bandwidth is a nice thing to offer, but charging for it after the fact in such a situation is derelict in my opinion.