Do you track ROB?

that is, your Return on Bandwidth?

[kpaul]

ok, i just came up with this tonight. maybe i'm slow. ;)

anyway, i was wondering about the pompos search engine and reading some forums. one (here i think) asked if all the bandwidth it was sucking was worth the traffic from the engine.

looking at me own stats, it wasn't worth it, unless i wanted to gamble on pompos becoming the next google someday.

looking at my stats further was interesting, though:

searchengine A - 52,000 spider hits, 15,000 visitors from the search engine .com

searchengine B - 18,000 spider hits, 160 visitors

searchengine C - 9,000 spider hits, 1,900 visitors

searchengine D - 53,000 spider hits, 0 visitors

can you guess which are which?

?) Pompos
?) Yahoo
?) Google
?) MSN

some i keep around because maybe they'll be bigger in the future. what is your personal cut-off point for a spider?

Final note: this may belong in 'Foo'?

[JAB Creations]

I think that spiders don't seem to hog too much bandwidth if you have a good deal on a hosting plan.

That said I think it's the hosts that need to offer more space and bandwidth.

People don't take such things in to consideration until after they have bought themselves in to a hosting plan.

When I buy a hard drive I buy a pair.
80 / 80 - Upgraded when I reached about 70GB on a single drive...

120 / 120 - I will upgrade when I reach about 110 GBs or so after cleaning everything out.

Drives start to die...I move stuff, and then get new drives eventually.

I do the same thing with hosts.

Last month Google sucked up about 100 mbs of bandwidth.

The issue is we are paying a premium for our hosting. We need to let bots crawl and index, else if they are unable to, only certain bots will survive and thrive. A bot can't thrive if clients dont pick it because your site shut it out.

Anyway don't let low bandwidth hold you back. The bots aren't wrong unless they're spam bots or they're making obvious 404s that never ever existed.

[gniland]

Allowing a bot onto your site is a gamble. Will it lead to more traffic or will it not? As for the MSN bot issue, it is taking alot of bandwidth but when MSN launches do you want to access their 30% market share?

[Raymond]

My SE traffic ratio is something like this:

60% Google
25% Yahoo
8% MSN

The rest is AJ, AV, AOL and Netscape.

I have yet to receive any leads from A9.

Conversion is highest from Yahoo, almost 100% higher than Google's traffic.

[Rosalind]

The SE bot that gives me the lowest return on bandwidth is Henry the Miragobot. But on the other hand the human traffic it sends is specific to the UK, which has to be a good thing. If bandwidth were tight I might consider banning a completely useless bot, but it would be the last thing I'd do after slimming down my pages and making other changes.