Morgenhund
msg:4047548 | 1:29 pm on Dec 22, 2009 (gmt 0) |
We once had a huge product catalogue with about 1000 visitors per day. Since the product catalogue was huge (affiliated catalogue), that produced massive traffic by search engines, visitors traffic was pretty insignificant comparing to them. All that resulted in about 4G monthly.
|
chadhenry
msg:4050831 | 3:40 pm on Dec 29, 2009 (gmt 0) |
One of our sites, that has about 3000 SKUs and gets about 500 visitors a day uses 7-9 GBs of bandwidth per month. Another one of our sites with roughly 6000 SKUs and the same traffic pattern uses roughly 4-6 GBs a month. It really depends on the average 'weight' of your pages. If you have a lot of product images, as well as a graphic heavy template you are going to use more bandwidth. If your template is 'clean and lite' your bandwidth usage will be much less. It will also depend on whether or not you are pulling in large js, jquery, etc libraries/ files to render your pages - and whether or not those files can be cached by your browser and/or server. Also, I would take a look at some of the 'all in one' shopping cart vendors. Sometimes, if they are charging based on bandwidth, they intentionally make pages heavy to eat up your bandwidth. I've developed several ecomm sites that were half the weight of some of the all-in-one solutions and have more site features and more product images. In my experience most cart providers that you are talking about aren't worth it but they do offer people who don't want to deal with the technical aspect of their site a decent option - they just aren't a solution I would personally go with.
|
gpilling
msg:4050865 | 4:50 pm on Dec 29, 2009 (gmt 0) |
many webhosts offer unlimited bandwidth. You can get shopping carts auto-installed with any host that offers cPanel too. Hostgator has a shared server for $5 per month for example. You can also trim your GB usage by making sure your images are optimized correctly, which will help with page load times too.
|
RhinoFish
msg:4051381 | 2:24 pm on Dec 30, 2009 (gmt 0) |
optimizing for speed and size are inter-related, so i suggest using the google page speed tool within firefox, it'll show you ways to save overhead. mod-expires and gzip, for example, can have a large impact. plus the tool optimizes images for you.
|
mellowmayhem
msg:4051444 | 4:10 pm on Dec 30, 2009 (gmt 0) |
Awesome info guys. Really helps. I think I'll stay away from the providers I mentioned earlier, for example volusion, 3dcart and a few others. Probably go for software that allows me to use my own hosting company. Right now I'm considering x-cart. I hadn't thought of providers cramming their code with crap to eat up band width. That makes pages load slower, losing customers just so the greedy providers can charge you more for increased bandwidth usage. As for optimizing images, I use about 60 or 70 quality for jpegs in photoshop. Hopefully that is good enough.
|
gpilling
msg:4051625 | 8:00 pm on Dec 30, 2009 (gmt 0) |
| As for optimizing images, I use about 60 or 70 quality for jpegs in photoshop. Hopefully that is good enough. |
|
Probably too good. Try some as low as 10 and with some blur added. Also, size matters a lot. Some carts (like OScommerce and ZenCart) do not automatically make a thumbnail and serve the large image for thumbnails but sized small. This wastes a ton of bandwidth and makes things slow. If you make thumbnails manually they can be added with those carts. Other carts use server side scripts to do this for you. A nice feature.
|
|
