Get the Best Price per Gigabyte with gb4less

Some time ago, I was looking for some new storage on Newegg.com. I became a bit frustrated looking for the best deal. Although Newegg allows you to sort by rating, you cannot filter on rating data (rating and # of reviews). If you sort by price, you have to try to read through everything to figure out which products have the best ratings and have been rated a fair number of times.

Being the analytical person I am, I just simply wanted the most bang for my buck, but I wanted to make sure the product I bought was tried and true. Eventually, I built gb4less to help others seeking to do the same (and of course, make a few bucks in the process). With gb4less, you can sort by price and filter on rating info at the same time and do much more!

Every hour, gb4less crawls Newegg for deals on internal hard drives, external hard drives, USB flash drives, system memory, memory cards, and SSD. It then calculates the price per gigabyte (including shipping) for all the products it finds, and then takes the top product for each category and displays them on the front page. If you don’t like the particular brand of the product you see on the front page, you can view all products n the category and search for the best price per gigabyte for your favorite brand.

The good folks at MakeUseOf placed a feature on gb4less in the MakeUseOf directory. Shortly after, the good folks at LifeHacker and Gizmodo also posted their own feature on gb4less. It wasn’t long after that before HostGator shut down gb4less, because all the traffic had brought down the entire server!

I was planning to eventually build a file cache to help the site to better handle traffic, but the bombardment from LifeHacker and Gizmodo expedited that plan. Fortunately, Yii (an excellent PHP framework I used to build gb4less) had built-in cache support. After a bit of research to implement the cache and a some hacking to re-enable the site, gb4less was back up and running.

So the next time you’re looking for some new storage, be sure to check out gb4less!