Site Question For Tech Monkeys: Bandwith Usage (Sitekeeping)
We've blown through every available upgrade package with our hosting company this month. Mostly because of 25,000 videos being watched every day by readers here. We will have used 600 gigabytes of bandwidth when the 30-day cycle ends on Thursday.
The issue is that their top hosting package allows for up to 400 GB, and everything after that is a la carte at $1 per gigabyte. Not a big deal for this cycle, but our traffic keeps growing and I expect it to get worse in coming months.
Our hosting companies top plan gives 400 GB for $50 per month, and everything beyond that is $1 per GB. Is this a good deal, or should we look elsewhere for hosting. Remember before you answer that we need dedicated, reliable hosting, not some shared plan that couldn't handle our traffic. I appreciate any advice on this matter.
While I'm at it, give me some feedback on our site's loading capabilities. Do our pages load quickly? Do we seem any slower or faster than other sites you visit? It's another factor that will help us figure this out. Mucho thanks, mis amigos.
Jul 13, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Reader Comments (17)
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.” Fellini
Oh to be less angry and coherent (logical, rational, sound, consistent, lucid – ouch, that hurts)…
First, I would like to talk about my presentation of the facts concerning Obama’s expensive flight to Hawaii before the election to visit Toots and seal his birth records. It is a fair contrast to Sarah Palin’s spending campaign contributions on clothes during the election. Okay, perhaps my peppered commentary on the facts was too poignant. I will try to tone it down and I do understand your points. I was just trying to passionately give the rest of the story. My comments about the hypocrisy of the press, especially with regards to the tone of Katie Couric’s questions and her needless quizzical looks will be replaced with more lighthearted and fun quips going forward. I reviewed the facts of that post and they still appear bang on so I will try to work on my presentation so as not to offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities or insight harsh debate. This is your sight and I have no say but I have pointed out to you that John Stewart often goes way past the line with his often nasty satirical rants on people who believe in God, support Sarah Palin or Dubya Bush, don’t believe in Obama, etc. I am just trying to make a small point.
One of Your Posts…
http://dailybail.com/home/the-daily-show-thats-great-now-fix-the-economy-clip.html
John Stewart – “The thing about the other guy who was President, ahhhh, the pretzel choker guy, um, was that even though he went to Harvard and Yale, he kind of went out of his way to come off as ahhh ahhhh a dumbass, ahhhh, underwhelming. Thus expectation was set not particularly high (he then contrasted this to his take on Obama).
Stephen Colbert is a good guy. I like your video posts of his show even though I would not watch it.
Okay…Big Issues Today…
As the Supreme Court has so far refused to take up the issue of Obama’s citizenship, I wonder if Sotamayor will be asked her opinion on the eligibility issue.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28111773/
CIT is near collapse and Bank of America is rotting from within as they attempt to digest Merrill Lynch and not pay for the obvious insurance (the moral commitment) given them by the bailouts. Is it still worthy of our attention to see the Fed, the regulators, and our government argue morals with the bankers and brokers? Oh, not to mention the lawyers raking in the fees. The whole system is absolutely rotten and corrupt.
Obama is failing to revive the economy or end the war, next stop, healthcare and immigration.
It is impossible to find out the result of the investigation into David Kellermann’s death.
Joe Bauman (a blogger) says…”The photographs are mysterious, brooding, dark. They show dimples and ripples, vast pockets of black, and unearthly rills where sunlight glistens. There are craters within craters within craters. These are among the first rewards of America's return to the moon, images radioed back from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can watch as a moonscape like wrinkled elephant hide comes closer. In some photos, bright spikes — peaks or big rocks — blaze like flames in the light and cast long shadows across the battered surface. And the likelihood of America actually returning to the moon as planned seems a lot more concrete as you look at these stunning views.
It's really happening, isn't it? We're really going back (TO THE MOON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).
On my front page I actually don't have any videos currently...they are all just screenshots of videos... and photos...
So I assume having the text of an article out on the front page for occasional stories as I do, doesn't add anything to my bandwidth usage...?
Keep educating me about these issues, everyone, please and thank you.
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
A rule of thumb is text is cheap. BBC or other high traffic news/blog sites are your model. Embed non-text content from other sites when possible and legally permissible. That way, they get dinged with the bandwidth hit. Always use thumbnail images on any pages other than the story page itself unless you have a very good reason to do so like with feature stories or only temporarily to draw your audiences attention to something in particular. You can actually get cheap or free image hosting on sites like Flickr or Imageshack to alleviate some of your impending bandwidth woes. Just look at what other players are using.
As always, you can take or leave these suggestions. Just my two cents. And yes you are a posting machine. Keep up the great work!
Your suggestions were great. Thanks. I downloaded pagespeed and the results were pretty good...I have cut my front page down to 10 stories instead of 20...I hate doing it because I think our stories get forgotten once they drop off the front page...
@High Altitude
Excellent tip...thanks.
Thanks for the feedback...good to hear that our stuff loads quickly.
@ Spidey
"Embed non-text content from other sites when possible and legally permissible. That way, they get dinged with the bandwidth hit."
thanks much for all the feedback from everyone. it's appreciated.
Many sites won't allow 'hot-linking' or frown upon it and yes, you would be subject to their download speeds however that can (sometimes) actually increase your page loading speed as the page is loading from different places at the same time. That's why I sent you the link to the cloud servers company.
@I assume you were talking about photos and not videos? Or if you were talking about video, are you saying that I should just link to most of my videos and not have them embedded here on the site?
Embedding is the way to go...you want to keep your visitors on your site as much as possible.
@Anyway, none of it should matter as long as I get on a plan that's feasible...
Exactly!
@ I like having large photos on the front page even if they eat bandwidth...I enjoy the images as much as anything...
And we do too, however you can reduce the quality of them slightly and save a bunch of bandwidth. Google "jpeg optimizer"
@spidey- Thanks. I may have an unfair advantage (I work for an ISP)
@DB- Stop feeding the troll and he will eventually stop posting off-topic. I'm a liberal (http://betrayedbyobama.blogspot.com) but I also do goldmansachs666.com. I , as a dirty hippy liberal atheist tree hugging democrat, am close to being the exact opposite of Mike Morgan but because we share a goal, we are able to work together. I just stay away from other topics where we disagree and stay focused on Goldman. (Actually I think Mike is more liberal than he realizes. True Christians tend to believe in many of the ideals as liberals)
I'm a liberal (http://betrayedbyobama.blogspot.com) but I also do goldmansachs666.com. I , as a dirty hippy liberal atheist tree hugging democrat, am close to being the exact opposite of Mike Morgan but because we share a goal, we are able to work together. I just stay away from other topics where we disagree and stay focused on Goldman. (Actually I think Mike is more liberal than he realizes. True Christians tend to believe in many of the ideals as liberals)
If you ever have anything from Goldman666 that you guys want to publish here, just let me know. Teamwork to achieve awareness among the sheeple and then eventually, glorious, succulent, hardened victory.
If you have not check out http://www.rackspace.com/solutions/managed_hosting/configurations/index.php I would. They are know to be one of the best, but your milage may vary.