Running out of Transfer

Any advice for reducing transfer for busy periods.

[lasko]

My website is less then 2 years old and is now one of leading websites in Google for the targeted audience and
every year at this particular time the site is too busy.

I had to purchase an extra 1Gb of transfer to make it through the month. I have 3Gb of transfer per month and I need some tips on how I can reduce the transfer as much as possible with out deleting some content or switching some content to a seperate domain name.

Any tips :)

[kevinpate]

Are you taking in lots of traffic from areas that are not your market and are not a market you plan on entering (If you don't market to say, the Far East, does your site need to be wide open to Far East users.)

Are you in a situation where you move or receive a lot of mail from the same bandwidth allotment as your web pages?

Is there a security problem and it's not you, but someone else who's gobbling your bandwidth (hotlinking to your images, hijacking mail area, etc.)

How heavy is your robot traffic, and do the bots have free reign across your site

Just some things to consider.

[lasko]

Some very good points that you have mentioned.

The site is for holiday rentals which advertisers individual
properties from owners and may be some of the photographs may be linked from.

As for the robots yes they have a free access to everything so every page will be indexed. I could start to reduce the tourist Information and use a different e-mail address from another domain. Especially when people send big e-mails with attachments of large photographs.

Its a problem that I never even dreamed about and now I have to face up to it and respect what I use and how often I update my website.

[Mardi_Gras]

You may want to consider storing your images on another server.

[rayhogan]

Also,

Do an audit on your image file sizes. Look for exceptionally large and common .

Try reducing the file size of your most commonly transmitted image files by reducing the number of colors, the compression ratio, etc.

To expand on a previous post, review your web logs looking for hits from a specific IP address to only an image file. This indicates that someone is hijacking your transmission capability by using your URL to an image file in their webpage. Stop them by renaming the image file, but, they may quickly followup by changing theirs. If so, you can resort to dynamically renaming the image file and putting the current name in each requested web page. All of this may be too much as your pages may not be dynamic, you may not have dynamic hosting etc ...

Finally,

Some sites will remove images when things get really bad. CNN.comdid this on 9/11.

Ray

[jpjones]

If its your own server then make sure your pages are being served compressed. Do a search on mod_gzip for apache, or make if using iis5, make sure compression is turned on.

A typical 50k web page squeezes down to between 5-10k - a nice saving in bandwidth, and a speed increase for those visitors who are on dial-up still.

JP

[lasko]

Have just re-designed one of my sites and reduced the amount
of html tags which have made my pages load quicker.

The site in question does have many images of properties etc. so looks like I will have to re-think the way I store my files. I carn't see anyone linking to my images so I will have to use an external e-mail address for when people send me images and files etc.

I receive 18,500 user sessions and have 3GB of transfer would this be normal or should I re-organize the way I work?

Thanks for all the comments :)

[webdevsf]

If using IIS 5, don't use compression - it's broken. Instead, you have to find a gzip isapi.

[Longhaired Genius]

How much does your extra gig per month cost?

Maybe it's time to move to a host that can smoothly and economically deal with your current and projected traffic.

[onlineleben]

Although many tips have alredy be told, for a good summary go here: [webreference.com ]

Helped me a lot with cleaning & speeding up my pages.