My web site is too popular all of a sudden

My hiking web site went down. I ran out of bandwidth. This is the earliest in a month that I have ever run out of bandwidth. Why is my site so popular all of a sudden?

Last Monday there was an article in the local newspaper about hiking and my web site was mentioned. But I thought nobody subscribes to that newspaper anymore since the big meltdown in 2006 when they fired everybody for not allowing management to meddle in the news and then kept firing them for union organizing.

I did a google search on the word hiking and my site turned up number 4 on the first page, right below Backpacker.com. How the heck did that happen? My site isn't about hiking the world, it's just about hiking in my little town.

It appears I was visited by a lot of robots yesterday, but the amount of bandwidth used, according to my stats, is less so far this month than it was for the entire month of May, so I do not understand how I ran out of bandwidth. I disallowed some unknown robots so we'll see if that helps.

I went in to my control panel and bumped up the bandwidth hoping that would restore my site. I pay a certain amount each month for a certain amount of bandwidth. Every now and then I've gone in and bumped up the bandwidth when it's come close to running out, bumping it over my allotment. I've never been asked to pay more. I set it to the maximum the form would allow and my site returned. I hope that helps.

Every now and then, and much more frequently lately, I get emails from people wanting to buy ads on my site. I responded to one of them one time. They wanted to advertise some store that sold really heavy gear, none of it was really backpacking gear, just heavy outdoors stuff maybe hunters would buy. I said no thank you and have been throwing out all the requests ever since. I kind of don't want portions of my site to feel owned by anybody, but also, I simply don't know what the advertising is worth. Perhaps it is time to give it a try. I just need a consultant to tell me how to do it.

Oh god, now I'm screwed. I'm sure I'll get hammered with spam for even mentioning such a thing.