One of the many new features in the Quick Blogcast 2.0.4 release is bandwidth overage protection. For the vast majority of our customers, this setting is largely useless since they never go over the existing bandwidth limits. But when you go over whether due to an appearance on Oprah or a popular Digg story (or even the granddaddy of them all, a Slashdotting), the ensuing attention can easily push you (and by you, I mean your account) over that limit. And that means fees will be charged and no one likes surprises.

So this feature monitors your daily bandwidth usage and turns off your blog if you go over. A message is displayed to your visitors (and a status code of 509 is attached to the response, if you comprende) until either the billing period rolls over or you buy some extra bandwidth through a direct purchase or an upgrade to a different plan. We will send you an email when you reach 80% of capacity as well as when the actual overage occurs. At the very least, you won't be shelling out for your newfound popularity.

To turn it on, go to Manage Blog and then Settings. It's at the very bottom of that page and it's a simple on/off decision. Please note that turning protection on after you're already over will not eliminate your responsibility to pay the overage but it will turn off your blog. Also, your decision applies to all the blogs you have since the bandwidth limits apply to them all.

We don't really like shutting down blogs at the height of their glory but we also know that people don't like getting the overage bills either. So we decided to leave the matter in your hands and let you figure out whether the trade-off is worthwhile. As I said above, this literally only affects a few dozen of you heavy-hitters. But you really never know when your big break might come!

(Side note: this is just the beginning of the feature. Our hope is to eventually make it much more palatable than a white screen with a condolence message. Ideally, we'd allow you to start degrading gracefully at predetermined thresholds so that the blog is still displayed but maybe with less entries, excerpts only, no images, or some other way. We'll revisit this in a future release and let you know about the changes on this here blog.)