I am looking for ways to reduce the bandwidth usage for one of my website. Since I have a free download page for some ebooks, my bandwithd usage is being sucked to the max in just 10 days beginning of this month. I would like to maintain my download page, but is there anyway I could reduce this high usage... I do not want to pay more for bigger hosting package at the moment... any genius ideas... appreciated.
I also think the best solution for your problem is to use Rapidshare or Megaupload to host your files. Or you can search another host that gives you more BW for the same money. Another possible solution is to ask the users to register before they can download (dont know if you are already doing this).
You may already be doing this, but you should also be sure that all of your ebooks are in an archive format such as zip or rar
yeah, I'm second that. there are many file sharing website out there that you can use.... rapidshare... megaupload... or whatever.
yes.. host your files on Free File Hosting Sites.(RapidShare,MegaUpload,Uploading.Com,etc,etc) and post the links on your website. until you get a good hosting your self.
Another option would be to set yourself up a tracker and seed as bittorrent... Though, looking at the page... Do you know what percentage of your bandwidth is actual downloads? Seriously, how many visits do you get vs. downloads of your content? It's very easy to blame your downloads when it could be that less than 5% of 'uniques' to your site never even touch them. Seriously, let's take your download page as an example: 18k of html, 25k if you count the THREE calls to google ads - you've only got 5k of actual CONTENT there... anything over a 1:2 ratio of content to code unless the layout is extremely complex (this is not) usually means poor coding. Given that the page is mostly text the ratio should probably be 2:1, so something around 7-8k. 23k of images in three files, this seems alright. 5k of scripts in one file - also this is fine since it's the google ads. 0k of CSS - you have your CSS inlined - since it's all the same page, CSS should be shared across pages tripping cache, meaning your CSS would only load once per site instead of on each and every hit - this is why inlined CSS AND inlined presentation are a /FAIL/ at bandwidth use. To make the user experience more enjoyable I would drop it down to calling google ads ONCE - if the user isn't going to click on the first one, they aren't going to click on the other two and the mere presence of that many ads will make the user go "SCAM" and leave. (or turn on their adblock if they have not already done so) But the big problem is all that inlined content - you get one visit from the 'yahoo bot of death' and your bandwidth for the month is GONE - yahoo's search engine can mistakingly assign ALL it's connections to simultaneously scan a site - I maintain a site where they did that to the forums and used 300 GIGS of bandwidth in 2 days. (I've since banned Yahoo's entire IP address range from accessing said site) - reducing the size of the actual HTML could greatly reduce your site traffic. 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Which would also likely result in higher search engine rankings since the markup is more semantic. (which could also cost you bandwidth by way of more feet in the door) I DOUBT that the entire site would need more than 5k of CSS, meaning you would be looking at 6k less for the first page view on the site, and upwards of 13k saved on subsequent pages... doesn't sound like a lot, but how many pageviews do you get vs. downloads? (you should have a rough idea since you've got urchin AND altavista in the home page) Though, in creating this edit I noticed you also have directory structure issues I'd consider adjusting to make your life easier.
deathshadow... i am scared looking your comment man... I never received such a detail comment via a forum. Thank you very much for your inputs.... I will try your ideas definitely
Deathshadow usually leaves detailed replies. They are always great though. I'd go with the ideas already said, if it's downloads that are taking up your bandwidth, use rapidshare or something. If it's not then you need to cut down that html file as DS said (which wouldn't be a bad idea even if it is the downloads).