Hosting graphics off the main server (as does ww)

[musicales]

I noticed browsing the HTML to this wonderful site that some of the images are hosted elsewhere.

If it's not too nosey, would be great if Brett could tell us the reasons for this - is it to reduce some bandwidth from the main server - and how successful has it been.

Does anyone else do what webmasterworld seems to do or know why it's like that?

[Brett_Tabke]

Off loading bandwidth.

It's been highly successful.

[musicales]

but what are the advantages over keeping them on the same site - are the graphics on a free site or something?

[BlobFisk]

I do it too on one of my sites. It works out cheaper for me to have two hosting services (with x amount of bandwidth per month) and use one for images and the second for everything else. It means that even with high traffic, I don't get too much of a bill every month for running over my bandwidth allowance.

[Brett_Tabke]

We cut out over 300k file requests a day by having them offsite. That's serious load and resource savings.

[musicales]

BlobFisk - don't you just run into bandwidth trouble with the second host then?

[BlobFisk]

That depends on the traffic!

If you look at it this way - if all of my files were on one hosted server, each page request results in images, css, js etc. files going through the server pipe and taking from my monthly bandwidth allowance.

By having two hosted servers, one page request means that the file calls are split between the two, images (which generally take up the most bandwidth) coming from one sever and everything else coming from the other.

This means that the pull on my bandwidth allowance is spread over two servers and I can make it last longer. Also, as Brett mentioned, you can balance load on the servers in a primitive method this way too.

[mivox]

Off loading bandwidth.
It's been highly successful.

I've noticed often the graphics are loading much slower than data off the main server, so I switch Opera to only load cached images. ;) If more than a few people do that, it would certainly help reduce bandwidth. hehehe

[Brett_Tabke]

On Opera, if you go to >Prefs >History and Cache and click on "never" for images, they will only load as neccessary. They will also respect "no cache" headers from images that need to be reloaded.

I can't invision a scenario when you'd ever want anything else. Unfortunatly, many cable and dsl services give their new members instructions on how to disable caching 100% in their browsers. This is good for dynamic content, and lousy for static content (like images). Some browser setups take that to the extreme and reload each and every graphic even if that graphic is a duplicate (such as some browsers, will issue 30-40 requests for the graphics in this thread).

[mivox]

Good tip... done. :)

[rmjvol]

I ran into a bw problem at a site that has holiday peaks. Site's on a small bw account & got shut down for overage one time.

Moved the main graphics to one of my hosting reseller accounts that has not much on it but has large bw allowance.

No problems so far.

rmjvol

[Lisa]

On a simple site there is no need for this much complexity, but here is what I do on my complex stuff.

I off load images as well to an image server. It works out great, the access log is much easier to read and parse. It also makes managing images much easier. I like to have one server for the website, one server for the database, one server for the index, one server for mail, etc... it makes managing growth that much easier. If one of those servers gets to much strain I can bring another server online to share the load for that server's job type. An image server doesn't take a lot resources to run, but the website may require two or three servers. Any site that receives over 1 Million visitors a month should think about scaling their operation so it grows properly.