We wanted to post a quick follow up to our recent missive about downshifting. At the time of publishing, we had no idea quite how people might react, and whether or not there would even be a Sidepodcast come the end of it.

We read every comment though and are incredibly grateful for the feedback and encouragement received. In some cases the responses were overwhelming. We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone for taking the time to reply.

Following on from that post, during the past 11 days, we've significantly reduced the time spent keeping up with F1. We missed all three free practice sessions for the Chinese GP last weekend, and then skipped Saturday's qualifying session too. Something we haven't done since starting Sidepodcast at the end of 2006. Thankfully mother nature provided just the right amount of variables to make Sunday's race worth getting up for.

It's safe to say, we are significantly happier with how things are now compared to a few weeks ago. In hindsight, nine separate podcasts covering the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend was verging on excessive, even if that was less than we did the previous year.

We've also spent a bit of time cutting back excess spending. Our podcast torrent server is no more, saving us roughly £100 a year and we're working on reducing our remaining hosting costs to something like £15 per month. Even without doing live shows this year, we are still managing to burn through over £60 worth of hosting costs a month between the Sidepodcast and F1 Minute sites. The challenge for the next couple of weeks is to cut back costs to a more sustainable level, without removing any more functionality.

From an administration point of view, life has also gotten easier. We must say a huge thank you to everybody who is helping out writing Daily posts, and contributing post race voicemails. All efforts are very much appreciated.

Additionally, you may have noticed that the media drop has gone into hibernation too. We're now encouraging people to share images and video via individual drop.io accounts or using alternate services such as Flickr.

A reduction in both effort and expense means the Sidepodcast you see now should be able to continue, regardless of any ongoing apathy towards the sport from our direction. It also means we have enough free time to get creative again.