Hosting at $15/mo or $250/mo? How to Reduce Your Bandwidth/Hits Costs?

[David Copeland]

[b]I think it's time to discuss the most
important issue and strategies to keep
bandwidth and hit costs DOWN
to $15/mo instead of paying $250/mo.

In another topic I read how the number
of pictures placed on one page can cause
that hit to be multiplies by 10!

I also read that by pulling images and
pictures from another free server, such
as hotmail, yahoo, geocities, etc, that
the bandwidth and hits would not be as
severe as having those pictures parked
on the same host you have your forum parked.

As a novice in all this, I thought the only
cost issue was bandwidth. But there has
also been the cost of the number of hits
a server can get . . . such as 1000 to 80,000 a
day or more!

Questions for all:

---------------

If I list our forum in all the search engines,
I've been told that we stand the chance of
spam being sent to a default email address
such as "webmaster@myforum.com" Some web
sites start at one free page which requires
a manual click on the user to access the
home host page server (thereby eliminating
the spam email coming to webmaster).

Question: What success (or complaints) have
you had regarding listing your site on the
search engines . . . and whether or not you
received spam or a lot of unnecessary hits?

---------------

Have you measured the difference with parking
your pictures on the home server versus having
them parked on a free server elsewhere, and
tagging the picture off-line? Or is the bandwidth
cost the same?

---------------

If you list your forum on the search engines,
and have the domain terminate on an html page,
whereby the member has to manually click to
access your pearl forum . . . would that save
hits and bandwidth . . . versus having all of
your domains hit on your pearl forum?

---------------

I have used jpg pictures over bmp pictures
thinking that the size of the jpg file comes
out smaller than a bmp file, and therefore
should save me bandwidth when the picture loads
up. Is that true?

---------------

Is there another picture format that I can use
besides jpg and bmp files that will produce a
high quality large image, but will use less
bandwidth?

---------------

There's been a lot of talk about the size
of a forum that grows, and what to do with
archiving the old topics. Has anyone tried
parking an Archive Site elsewhere for free,
which would have less traffic?

---------------

Is it possible to save on hits by combining
ALL of the (6-10) separate pictures on one
page into ONE image file, so as to eliminate
having the page load 6 to 10 times for each picture?

Any other ideas for saving on hit and bandwidth
costs?

Thanks,

David

[Kathy]

I think I'm having a hard time following your questions since I wonder if you are confusing "spam" with traffic. I thought that spam was an email term for "unsolicited" email. I am registered with the search engines and get much of my traffic (positive, healthy, good traffic that I want to get) from my listings. Spam? I don't get much spam email, and none that I know of from my search engine listings. This contributes ZERO to my bandwidth, hits issue for my website.

I WANT traffic on my site. I register and work hard every way I can to get more traffic on my site. Why? I'm not on the internet with a website and message board to hide it. I want traffic because of the kind of service we are doing on the website...and I can't pay for the website without the traffic. Its a cycle, but a healthy one. I'm glad that I have a bandwidth/hit problem. LOL...This means I'm in a rare category of having a "successful" website and message board. I can actually pay for my server from that traffic. Yep, I get paid for ads on my site...for people to see and click on. I'm making money on the net.

I also don't mind the graphics being "hit" from my domain. It makes for loading the pages faster if they are right there. Putting them on a free site somewhere would slow down the process and I want to maintain a fast flying site.

My website is now up to 80 - 100K per day of hits...sometimes even a bit more. I would rather pay 250.00 a month (which is CHEAP for a dedicated server space) than be hosted on a 15.00-40.00 a month site where there are few MYSQL connections. Of course, when I started my message board a year ago, I didn't have this traffic. As the traffic grew, my needs changed. I wouldn't have dreamed of paying 250.00 a year ago for my website. But, my needs didn't demand it either. This is the great thing about the net. You can upgrade as you need....and if you don't ever need to upgrade then you can continue on a 15.00 a month site.

As for graphics, if you are using bmp on the net, they aren't viewable by most. Browsers are created to view jpgs or gifs. I prefer gifs since they are indexed pixels, making for smaller files (usually). I took my graphics on my site and shrank all the gifs. It meant a great deal of savings to me. This is why I was able to stay below the 15 gb I was paying at a previous host....although I was getting more hits. BMPs are HUGE files (usually) and not compatible for browsers....

As for archiving old posts, I had to archive every 3 days on my UBB and haven't done it at all on the VB. The way the database keeps posts, I can dump/prune the database based on age when I want to....and I will eventually. But since my speed isn't affected and the VB is kind with the posts' storage, I haven't fretted about this issue.

As for the overall bandwidth/hit issue...I wouldn't worry about this before you have to....Use graphics carefully and shrink them to as small a size file as you can effectively without losing quality. Build your website and message board...and when you need to worry about bandwidth/hits, perhaps you will be making money enough to cover the costs.

I wish you well,
Blessings, Kathy

[eva2000]

so many questions :D. ...


advice on the graphics side of things... purchase this app called Ulead Smartsaver Pro and use it to preview and optimise your images in jpg, gif and png formats

http://www.webutilities.com/

combining all images into one may or may not reduce the size of the image.... it depends on the number of colours used in the image and also the format it's saved in... generally combining images does not save bytes...

you'd be surpise how much byte size you can cut images down to with this app Ulead Smartsaver pro ... i use it all the time...

as for search engine listing, how important to get listed depends on the type of forum you run... mines a forum related to japanese anime and for most people including me, the number 1 aim for a new or existing forum, is to get as much traffic/visitors to their forums as possible...

search engine listing is important and in my short 3 yrs online running web sites i have only been spammed by a search engine once ! I had a contact form on one site and fastweb/alltheweb.com search engine crawled it and i got an email from the form.... that was the only time ever i have had a search engine do them... i have 36 domains, and 25 of them have gone through so kind of search engine submission... you don't get spammed by search engines...

but if you submit your sites to search engines using 3rd party submission sites/agencies you may get emails from them and not the search engine...

for most forums, you worry about bandwidth and hits after you grow in size, the most important thing is the visitors/traffic and level of member participation. But the assumption that once you have alot of traffic and visitors, you will then in turn make enough money to cover costs with paid banner ads is slightly incorrect... it depends on what your forum's genre and theme is..

you have to remember ad agencies, accept or reject sites based on the forum/site's audience, theme and the advertisers they have on their books.

if you had a forum on warez or illegal matters like that, you will find it hard to get ad agencies and ads to put on those forums.. or if you have a forum with a theme that has only a few advertisers related to your topic then it would be hard to get advertisers...

[David Copeland]

[b]Kathy and Eva . . .

Thanks for your replies.

What search engines did you register with?

(Also, thanks for the graphics link.
I will give that a go too.)

-------------

Eva2000 . . .

What is your thinking about parking
an image on the host server versus
having it linked elsewhere to a reliable
site . . . as far as load speed?

David

[eva2000]

Eva2000 . . .

What is your thinking about parking
an image on the host server versus
having it linked elsewhere to a reliable
site . . . as far as load speed?

David as far as load speed goes having it on the same server as the forum would result in the best speed possible... in terms of bandwidth sure it will increase that too...

[Susan]

Another tool for shrinking graphics, and it's free! Net mechanic offers their optomizer on the web for free. You simply add in your URL on this page: http://www.netmechanic.com/accelerate.htm click the Go graphic, and it gives you several options for shrinking your files.

[eva2000]

ah yes, nearly forgot about netmechanics free service... it's pretty good if you have an existing page online already... for images on your local computer, smartsaver pro is the best...