serving images from a seperate domain

using the same images across multiple websites

[topr8]

now i know WebmasterWorld does it, but ...

lets suppose there are a group of widget sites that belong to us, these sites present widgets in very different ways, however like everyone else in this widget industry we are all selling the same several hundred products, we also have a moderate problem with bandwidth theft re sites calling our images.

we are considering creating a separate domain on another server or maybe the same server - to serve our images accross all the sites.

the advantages as we see it are...

easier management of our images.

possible bandwidth saving due to browser caching if visitors visit several sites.

easier to prevent bandwidth theft by using a linux server for the images, as i haven't worked out an effective way to prevent unwanted calls on our images from the win server (am happy with asp for our applications)

the downside could be

easier for our competitors to discover the true nature of our web presence (not too worried about the SE duplicate content issue)

technical issues i'm unsure about

would this make the pages resolve slower as the browser has to call images from another domain?

if the images were used on a secure page i'd get the warning message from some browsers regarding part of the page being unsecure

[6]any downside i haven't considered?[/6]

[jpjones]

Hi topr8,
This is something I do - in essence its a load-balancing move, which takes some pressure off the main server, both in terms of CPU cycles (used knocking out pages), and bandwidth.

would this make the pages resolve slower as the browser has to call images from another domain?

This depends on what server you are using. If its at the same network (or the same server) as your main site, then to your visitors, there should be no noticable difference in speed.
If the image server is located elsewhere, some visitors might find the images download slower, some might find it downloads faster. It depends how many hops the visitor is away from the image server, and what sort of speed the links which make up the path between the visitor and the image server run at.

if the images were used on a secure page i'd get the warning message from some browsers regarding part of the page being unsecure

Correct. You'd have to get an SSL for the image server to to bypass this problem.

The only other downside I can think of is that if your image server is based on another server/network from your main site server, and the image server is rebooted, or the network it is on becomes inaccessible due to router failure etc, then visitors coming to your site will see the HTML, and lots of those X image placeholders. This *COULD* be damaging to your branding.

HTH,
JP

[eaden]

another downside is you'll have to use absolute url's in your image which will add to your code size.

Overall it's a good idea, and if you want to be really speedy you could use a relly fast webserver such as thttpd or boa which are a lot faster/ can handle more connections than apache at static files.

As for the https "do you want to display the non-secure items?" - yes some browsers will display that message. I havn't tried this, but if you bought a ssl cert for the image server, even though the domain would be different, as the're both ssl secured you may not get that error - or then again you might get a completely different error.

[jpjones]

another downside is you'll have to use absolute url's in your image which will add to your code size.

Very true. A good reason to register as short a domain name as possible for use in this purpose! You can then forget about anything before the domain name (e.g. www.domain.cc), and just go domain.cc. Yes, it will bloat your code, but it will help minimise the bloat.

as the're both ssl secured you may not get that error - or then again you might get a completely different error.

I've done this and you don't get an error. All browsers care about is if all the elements on the page are called securely using HTTPS. If they are, no error/warning is displayed.

JP

[topr8]

thanks that clears up the https issue,

i don't think using absolute url's is that big an issue
- with a short domain name it doesn't add much.