Forum Moderators: buckworks
Can someone give me an idea of how much bandwidth you need? For example, how much monthly bandwidth would you need for 1000 visitors a day?
Also, I understand spiders eat up some bandwidth. How significant is that?
I've found a lot of carts charging Between $25 to $150 monthly for 1 GB to 5 GB. Then they charge $1 to $10 more per additional 1 GB.
Another solution charges about 1% transaction fee instead of bandwidth.
I am interested in anyone's experience/thoughts regarding this.
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.
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.
mod-expires and gzip, for example, can have a large impact. plus the tool optimizes images for you.
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.
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.
