Forum Moderators: phranque
What I'd like to know what a "normal" traffic for a 400 MB site is. Do I need more than 20GB? I might get an additional 10 or 20GB package if necessary.
If your Thailand photo gallery doubles your bandwidth consumption, your traffic must be up as well and this seems like a really good "new" niche. (there are also pitfalls like bandwidth thieves, so do some investigation).
Look for opportunties here and "Yes" I would definitely consider a more robust package for bandwidth (or reduce the need for bandwidth, smaller file sizes, thumb nails, off site re-directs, etc.)
(and then it gets really expensive - $10 for each additional GB).
If I was to build another gallery from scratch, I think I would have my images served on the fly, with only thumbnails in the HTML.
And I agree with that sort of traffic, there HAS to be a way to make some $$$s
Shak
Currently I'm on a package 500MB/20GB for $15/ month. Exceeding the traffic quota costs $10/GB, but you can also get another 500MB/20GB package for $15, so it's not so terrible.
I have disabled hot linking (with .htaccess), disabled directory browsing, banned most known download agents. Even inserted code which automatically adds a deny from xx.xx.xx.xx line to .htaccess when somebody tries to download the site.
I'm trying to understand what an appropriate traffic for a 500 MB site is. I suspect that a well established 500 MB site generates considerably more than 20GB/month of traffic, maybe something between 30 and 50GB, but I can't tell as I'm relatively new to the web.
The big problem is that at the moment I'm not translating this traffic into income. There is no advertising for instance. I just became an Amazon associate and will soon offer some books (travel guides) for sale, but I don't know how much revenue this will generate. I've been told that banner ads have extremely low click through rates and therefore generate very little money.
So, I don't know if I should be happy if traffic increases. I've even stopped promoting the site.
The big problem is that at the moment I'm not translating this traffic into income. There is no advertising for instance.
The first thing to do if banner ads are a possibly, profile your visitors by demographics (from where (search query, engine, link, geographic, when (best time of day and day of month), and profile your site by page most entries, most accessed, most time "eyes" duration).
Take this info and make a web site statistics page and potential banner prices (introductory prices at 50% to 75% to start maybe for the first few inqueries).
Attractively link (and somewhat low profile) this in your site in such areas such as about us, contact us, but outside of your actual gallery.
Start getting the word out (offline and local) in industries that these targets and number may appeal to.
It is best to limit yourself to only a small number of banners -- for if you get too many distractions your visitation rate could decline.
What is your average graphic size? How many hits/day are you receiving?
That depends on the day. In the past three peak days it was about 1000-1100 visitors a day, each visiting an average of 7 pages. One image is an average of 150KB, i.e. the average visitor seeing 7 pages generated about 1-1.1 MB of traffic.
Under normal conditions webalizer registers about 700-800 visitors/ day and around 5000 page views. But there are about 4% of visitors who generate almost 50% of the traffic (people who view between 50 and 500 pages).
The first thing to do if banner ads are a possibly, profile your visitors by demographics
Attractively link (and somewhat low profile) this in your site in such areas such as about us, contact us, but outside of your actual gallery.
<-- One image is an average of 150KB
That seems extremely large ! If they are just photos then you could get them down to at least 40-50kb without losing any quality.
In fact you could get them as low as 25k if not lower
Dazz
<-- One image is an average of 150KBThat seems extremely large ! If they are just photos then you could get them down to at least 40-50kb without losing any quality.
In fact you could get them as low as 25k if not lower
That depends on the quality. My images are 800x600 and are top quality - you can't see any JPEG artifacts. I've tried saving an image in a lower quality setting. The size of this specific file went down from 166K to 125K, but you started seeing a blockiness in the sky.
At the moment I'm playing with the idea of selling the images to magazines (as a stock photographer), and that's why I'm sticking with this quality level - as I said, at the moment. Shouldn't this work out, I might just resize all images to 640x480, increase compression and try to cover my expenses with advertising.
There are some graphic gurus here that may be able to help, you might try posting something in the graphics forum I am sure they might be able to help you get the file size down, for instance there is a way of just compressing certain parts of the photo that won't affect the quality.
good luck
Dazz
Onya
Woz
If you want to get rid of this, and you have Apache, httpd.conf or .htaccess customization is enough.
Here some info:
-> In Google, try:
apache htaccess hard linking images
[without quotes of course]
cminblues
Despite the fact that I get over 600 search engine hits/day, the top 20 search terms only cover a total of 1000 hits in the past 19 days.
You can easily get webalizer to show all search strings, not just the top ones. You have to add the line
AllSearchStr yes
to your webalizer config file, or get the provider to do it if you don't have access. This will place a link "all search strings" under the top 20.
I use three levels of images. First a small thumbnail 150px across and less than 5Kb (maximum compression). Second an enlarged image that displays within the normal site, size 450px and between 20-30Kb(minimal compression). Finaly for those few people who want to see it full sized a full screen 800px or larger image with no compression at all.
Adding in the intermediate file size should reduce your bandwidth significantly.
That sounds interesting how?
I think we are some what in the same categorie I got a huge page with pictures and about 5000 visits a day, thevisitor are also going through a few sites.
My ave. pictures are 80-100kb, the best graphic tool is Photoshop 7.
zeus
Are you sure that nobody is hard-linking your images from another site[s]?
Yes - I've already installed the anti-leeching code. Besides it would show up in the access logs.
I guess this may be a lot of work for you! There are batch resize tools out there which would take some of the burden.
I ended up with bandwidth problems on a site that exceeded 60GB a month. In the end I limited certain areas of the site to subscribers for a small fee.
Musicales,
what kind of content were you offering and why would people pay for it?
you would definitely save bandwidth by making three graphic sizes instead of two. 450px is big enough to give a good quality view of a graphic.I guess this may be a lot of work for you! There are batch resize tools out there which would take some of the burden.
The problem is not resizing the images - a batch job will do that overnight. The big problem is generating the html code to add that third layer of detail (first layer the thumbnails, second the medium size images, third layer the big images). Try doing that for a site with 2100 images.
Still, I agree that it's a good idea to offer the medium and large size as an option to visitors. I saw a photo gallery where in the thumbnails at the lower left and lower right corners there were small buttons '640x480' and '1024x768'. Quite a cool solution, but I'd need the right software for that (generation of the html pages).
I am assuming your pages are handwritten html, in which case it is a long task. If they are all the same format, you may be able to have a programmer write a program which would perform a global update on your html documents - its probably not the worlds most difficult techie task!
The first thing to do if banner ads are a possibly, profile your visitors by demographics ...
Are there any tools which help doing that? Webalizer isn't too detailed - concerning the country information it can't tell me where 80+% of the people come from. Despite the fact that I get over 600 search engine hits/day, the top 20 search terms only cover a total of 1000 hits in the past 19 days.
Many visitors will likely come in under their host ISP and many of these tend to be dot.com and dot.net (or extremely hard to identify using this approach. (language of browser may help).
Attractively link (and somewhat low profile) this in your site in such areas such as about us, contact us, but outside of your actual gallery...
But these pages get very few hits. Should I sell the banner according to a click though rate, revenue would probably be minimal.
You do not want to advertise banner space on your high traffic pages. The visitors likely going here are generally not the same ones looking to advertise. As I said before, you may want to start locally (off-line).
On the other hand, putting a top banner on the image pages (those which get the bulk of the traffic) would somehow spoil the appearance. Besides traffic - at 700-800 visitors a day - isn't too huge, although it might be very focused. Are there any potential advertisers which would pay a fixed fee/month or a fee according to the page view (and not to the click-through)?
Your primary pages are images/gallery stuff - a banner can look the same (in context, theme and appeal).
As far a pricing model, start low -- the idea is to have these fees paying some of your cost -- and not necessarily to creates profit revenue. Your web site is not a portal with enormous traffic under a variety of topics but it can help reduce your associated cost.
From msg #:7
I have disabled hot linking (with .htaccess), disabled directory browsing, banned most known download agents. Even inserted code which automatically adds a deny from xx.xx.xx.xx line to .htaccess when somebody tries to download the site.
Are you using mod_rewrite to block hotlinking and download agents?
Most download agents can be configured to fake MSIE or Netscape User-Agents. They usually have no referring URL and can be easily spotted in your access_log
For example
"GET /image.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 151204 "-"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"
The following code in mod_rewrite will block hotlinking and allow access to normal browser User-Agents even if there is no refering URL.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://domain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif¦jpg¦png)$ - [F,NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
The above line allows access without a refering URL. Removing it will prevent downloading of images for most bots.
However Proxy servers will also be blocked. ISP's also want to reduce their bandwidth costs. Forunately most Proxy servers use Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
IMHO it is not a good idea to block Proxy servers. This is what I use to block hotlinking and most browser download bots. Proxy servers are allowed access.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^Mozilla/3.01
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://domain\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif¦jpg¦png)$ - [F,NC]
From msg #:10
Under normal conditions webalizer registers about 700-800 visitors/ day and around 5000 page views. But there are about 4% of visitors who generate almost 50% of the traffic (people who view between 50 and 500 pages).
If 4% of visitors are generating 50% of the traffic you may have a big problem with browser download bots faking normal visitors.
Thank you for posting that Gorufu. I am using the standard RewriteCond code to stop requests from other than my domain, along with a long list of UA disallows.
You say ...most Proxy servers use Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)... This is what I use to block hotlinking and most browser download bots. Proxy servers are allowed access.
How about international and other portals/proxy cache servers who do not use Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;) as their UA? While I understand this code accomplishes more efficient screening for UA spoofing, I still am hesitant to use an accross the board block with unknown variables when I get significant international referrals.
