Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

What's your bandwidth usage?

mnkeybsness

mnkeybsness

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jun 25, 2001
2,511
0
Moneyapolis, Minnesota
For everyone out there who does optimize their site for web (compressed images and small html file sizes), what is your average bandwidth?

Over the past couple months, I've seen a dramatic increase in the bandwidth usage to my site, but not as much of an increase in visitors and I just can't figure out why.

I generally average about 1200-1500 Megabytes, but last month jumped to 3157, and already this month, I'm at 2076!
 
Last month my site's was 2.53GB, but that's because of my optimized camino builds.

mnkeybsness said:
I generally average about 1200-1500 Megabytes, but last month jumped to 3157, and already this month, I'm at 2076!
Click to expand...

I'd check my logs to see what files are being downloaded a lot. The log analyzer program that I use will usually tell me how much was downloaded of each file.
 
Bandwidth is a measure of speed, eg. 256 kb/s. I'm not sure what the proper word is for what you're describing, but 'traffic' is a common one :)
 
mnkeybsness said:
Over the past couple months, I've seen a dramatic increase in the bandwidth usage to my site, but not as much of an increase in visitors and I just can't figure out why.
Click to expand...

Do you have access to the raw logs, or generated statistics? Usually I find that a disproportionate increase to bandwidth/hits compared with visitors means the either you've added a lot to the site and visitors are viewing more pages, or more likely, one or more spiders are indexing your site.

Do you have lots of images? Might be Google's image search. Lots of audio? AOL's singingfish.com. Lots of pages? All the other search engines :)

I haven't really optimised my main sites for bandwidth. Any new ones I do are, but being new they don't tend to use much. The 3 main sites I write/maintain are -

nightb4.com - about 15GB/month ("normal" usage, html & images)
slamevents.com - varies a lot, last month was just under 200GB (a lot of mp3s & video)
somarecords.com - about 80GB/month (lots of mp3s)
 
Nermal said:
Bandwidth is a measure of speed, eg. 256 kb/s. I'm not sure what the proper word is for what you're describing, but 'traffic' is a common one :)
Click to expand...

I think traffic tends to be a more general term to describe how busy the site is, maybe in terms of visitors. [Data] Transfer would probably be the proper term, but a lot of people still use bandwidth to describe it so they're still interchangable for most websites.

The really big websites will measure bandwidth rather than transfer as that is quite often how they're charged - not per GB but per Mb/sec.
 
Nermal said:
Bandwidth is a measure of speed, eg. 256 kb/s. I'm not sure what the proper word is for what you're describing, but 'traffic' is a common one :)
Click to expand...


Many webhosts use the term "Bandwith" when they refer to total data transfer, so I wouldn't say he used it out of context as this is what he meant. The more accurate term would be monthly data transfer - but who cares.

http://asmallorange.com/services/hosting/
http://surpasshosting.com/
 
OK, 'traffic' is often used here in NZ as a measure of how much you've transferred, maybe other countries use different descriptions. I also took a look at a few US-based webhosts, and you're right, they seem to use 'bandwidth' to indicate data transfer. I couldn't find any hosts in NZ that use this terminology though.
 
Nermal said:
OK, 'traffic' is often used here in NZ as a measure of how much you've transferred, maybe other countries use different descriptions. I also took a look at a few US-based webhosts, and you're right, they seem to use 'bandwidth' to indicate data transfer. I couldn't find any hosts in NZ that use this terminology though.
Click to expand...

Well you know how Americans butcher the language. What do you expect? :p

I think the real problem is most people don't really know what bandwidth means, so they use it incorectly, and then when web sites say traffic people don't know what it means, so they just say bandwidth to save the effort of explainging it all.
 
433GB this month so far... ;)

If you have a lot of text like this site... mod_gzip is an excellent way to reduce your bandwidth requirements. I suspect yours looks like it's more images than anything.

find your logs as mentioned above.

arn
 
For rather insane bandwidth usage figures, look no further than this thread on the Server Matrix forums. In particular putfile.com which uses roughly 30TB/month.

Of interest to the people that use A Small Orange, they use over 11TB a month.
 
If the higher bandwidth usage is not a result of more users or more site usage, it could be a result of people hotlinking to images on your site, if your site is using a lot of images. You can verify that by checking out your site logs. If you are using a Linux server, there's a way to prevent hotlinking using RewriteEngine in the .htaccess file. This works well for me.
 
Fluidvision.net pulls about 3gigs a month. Depending on my sub-domains and their traffic.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back