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Website Bandwidth

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 mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
My ISP/Web host has advised me that I have exceeded my daily bandwidth allowance on my website.

Am I write in beleiving that this is the amount of data, files etc that I upload to the site? I have only used half of my actual webspace allowance. Grateful for advice from any experts.
 DaveHall246 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex: I think it's probably the amount of data downloaded from your site - ie by people looking at it.
 rogersavery 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex:

its the amount of data transferred between the web server and visitors decives i.e. the number of people viewing the pages
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
Hmm, can't very well stop folk looking at it can I? What solutions would be available?
 Tall Clare 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex:

Can you increase the bandwidth allowance? Great news that so many people are taking an interest though!
 DaveHall246 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex: ISPs normally offer different levels of account which allow more download bandwidth (as well as more webspace on their server) in return for more money!
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to Tall Clare:
> (In reply to mypyrex)
>
> Great news that so many people are taking an interest though!
It's probably more likely my own "hits" where I've been testing it (ON line as well as off line)
In reply to mypyrex:

No it's the amount of data sent from your site to visitors' browsers, so text, images, videos, etc. Each time someone views a page all the bytes transferred are added up.

Without knowing what your ISP's terms are - it sounds like you are using one of the free webspace accounts that ISPs bundle with their deals then it's a choice between upgrading your account with them or moving the data on the webspace to another provider. Other than people losing bookmarks there's not a lot of pain involved. Yes, you'll have to pay, but a lot of web hosting plans are pretty low cost in the scheme of things. Also if you do switch then you'll be offered things like your own domain name (assuming you don't have one already), OK, basically they're inducements.

If you don't want to switch then look at the sizes of all the files on your site, it will usually be the case that videos are the largest files, followed by images then plain text (html) files. If you have any Flash on your site then that will be pretty big as well. If you have access to the server logs or have Google analytics installed on your site then you'll be able to see the most popular pages and therefore what's contributing most to your bandwidth. Use this info to put that content on a CDN. What you do is rather than host the files on your site, i.e. on your ISP's servers, you put them on different servers and link to them. You can use Google Drive to do this http://blogvkp.com/using-google-drive-as-cdn/ and probably Skydrive and iCloud as well. Your visitors see the same site, it's just that it comes from two different locations. Obviously there are potential problems with this as well.

HTH

ALC
 JoshOvki 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex:

If you have large uncompressed pictures, shrink and compress them. They can easily eat into your allowance.

In Google Chrome if you go to the "three lines" in the top right, then Tools, Development Tools, you can run an audit that lets you see what they would recommend changing. It will pick up on things such a big images, badly used javascript and CSS files that are increasing bandwidth etc. If you want to email me a link to your website I will be happy to take a look and tell you what I would do if it was one of me.
 Mike-W-99 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex:
Doing a lot of testing with that wmv file you've been messing around with?
How big is it.
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to All: Thanks for ALL the info and advice. I'm a lot clearer about it now and I shall probably upgrade - cost is minimal.
In reply to Mike_Watson_99: Was going to say, if you're serving video from your webhost you'll end up burning out pretty quick - you'll also really slow down the overall performance of your site as the server displaying non-video assets (html, css, images) will be tied up delivering the vids...

Generally, it's best to move your video (and any static assets) over to another host like Amazon S3. You can get a free account which is great for a year and see where you are at the end.

If you are serving a lot of video, it might be worth considering Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare or another content distribution network.
In reply to mypyrex:

DON'T compress jpeg or mpeg files, they already are compressed and running them through zip or similar can actually increase their size.

It may be worth minimising CSS and Javascript files but since a browser typically will download these only once and cache them for a while it will only be a small gain. The reason for minifying is for initial page load speed rather than bandwidth concerns though it will have an affect on that - look up Steve Souder's pages about improving this area of your website, though some of the tips will only be achievable if you can tweek server settings which you won't be able to do on an ISP account.

ALC
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to All: I'm also compressing my image files
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to a lakeland climber: Ooops, didn't see your comment until I'd posted about compressing!

Think it might be easier if I upgrade.
In reply to mypyrex:

Figured that

ALC
 rallymania 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex:

i think i noticed when i looked at your site at the weekend that your picture files were still "full resolution"
but you are only displaying them at something like 640x480
it'd be worth resizing them before you upload them which is what i guess you mean by compressing?

cheers
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to rallymania: When I "compress" I'm doing it in Paint Shop Pro with the "uncompressed" image shown as(eg) 9,456,000 bytes and a compressed image of (eg) 260,000 bytes
In reply to mypyrex:

Not sure of PSP but you want a "resize" or "save for web" option. Are you going from a PSP file to jpeg in your "compression"? 260Kb is around the maximum size UKC permit BTW.

ALC
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to a lakeland climber: All my images are JPEG
OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to a lakeland climber: In Paint Shop it's:

File -> Export -> JPEG Optimizer. You then set a "Compression Value" which reduces it from, say, 9,000,000 bytes to, say, 260,000 bytes
In reply to mypyrex:
> (In reply to a lakeland climber) All my images are JPEG

EEEK!!

By this I assume that you take the shots on camera as jpeg then modify them in PSP before saving them as jpeg again? This is NOT a good idea, the JPEG compression algorithm is lossy. Every time you make a change and save the file you lose a bit of quality. It's a bit like getting a letter, photocopying it then passing the photocopy on to someone who photocopies it before passing it on, etc. Import your shots, work on them in the native format of the program you are using then as a last step convert them back to jpeg using "save as". If you need thumbnail images then do two "save as" commands - one for full size and one for the thumbnail.

You have to do a bit of trial and error to find the right JPEG settings, it's a balance between filesize and quality. I find that a quality setting around 60 - 65 works for me for web images, but it does depend on the image contents as some scenes compress better than others.

ALC



In reply to a lakeland climber:

I also meant to say that you should resize the image at the same time that you do the export.

ALC
 timjones 07 Jan 2013
In reply to a lakeland climber:
> (In reply to mypyrex)
>
> DON'T compress jpeg or mpeg files, they already are compressed and running them through zip or similar can actually increase their size.
>

Rubbish you need to be careful but there are huge advantages to resizing and carefully compressing jpgs. It saves bandwidth and makes life more pleasant for those who view your site without the luxury of super fast broadband.

We design for rural connection speeds and there is no image that cannot be reduced to sub 70k without any major loss of quality. If you want to include high-res images then link to them rather than forcing everyone to download them by default.

In reply to timjones:

You've got the wrong end of the stick here

You are confusing JPEG compression, ZIP compression and resizing.

If you have an image that let's say is 4096 x 3072 pixels in size then you can reduce its size to say 640 x 480 but you aren't compressing it - the software is actually doing sampling to remove the excess pixels. (The above would lead to a 64x reduction in size - roughly) In addition you can set the q-factor (commonly called "the quality setting" but the 'q' actually stands for quantization) to increase the JPEG compression, this is lossy and once you do it you can't get what you removed back. This is why you don't edit jpeg images, each edit/save cycle removes some information, even if you set the q-factor to 100.

If you now take the jpeg file and apply something like the zip algorithm to it then it's likely that the file size will increase. Some later versions of zip utilities can reduce the size but you need the same software at the other end to unzip it.

ALC
 Brass Nipples 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex:

Unless its intended to be a professional site I wouldn't worry too much about saving jpg more than once. Just don't go mad. A jpg saved a few times isn't going to lose so much data that image looks rubbish on a personal web page. Like Tim I resize to around 800 x 600 or less and save for web. I keep the original size jpg unchanged in case I want to manipulate it again.

Although Lakeland climber talks about zip, they are the only one doing so. By compress jpg I think most are referring to resizing images to be smaller, and then increasing the amount of jpg compression via the quality setting. It's called the quality setting in photoshop anyway.

If using photoshop you can do this all in batch mode via Adobe bridge. This speeds things up somewhat rather than an image at a time....
 Philip 07 Jan 2013
In reply to a lakeland climber:
> (In reply to mypyrex)
> [...]
>
> EEEK!!
>

Overly dramatic. Unless you shoot in RAW (or similar) you will start with a JPEG. If you need to make changes you will end with a JPEG. That's twice you have to put it through the filter. Which if you edit your photos in one session using a decent photo editor will only result 1 additional save. Repeatedly hitting Ctrl-S will bugger it up, but there's no indication the OP is doing this.

The important thing is to make you changes at full size, then resize, then sharpen. When doing the final save choose a quality setting that doesn't ruin the image - many programs will allow you preview the effect or export several versions.

Finally, the uncompressed size is not the original JPEG but the size of the bitmap. So PSP might say uncompressed 10mb for a 2.5mb JPEG which would be 400kb if resaved smaller and with higher compression (lower quality).

You could remove the thumbnails if you want to squeeze every bit of spare capacity out of it.
 Philip 07 Jan 2013
As an aside - I'm convinced Facebook does a re-save to uploaded photos (if you don't tick the high quality setting) even if they're small in resolution. I've uploaded some sharp 1024 px images saved at 90-95% quality and they look awful on FB. They're never for anything special - I only really noticed it when my sister-in-law posted some portraits of her son that I did.
 timjones 07 Jan 2013
In reply to a lakeland climber:
> (In reply to timjones)
>
> You've got the wrong end of the stick here
>
> You are confusing JPEG compression, ZIP compression and resizing.

I'm not confusing anything, it's all very simple. Unless I'm mistaken you are the only one that is confusing things, has anyone else even mentioned ZIP compression?

OP mypyrex 07 Jan 2013
In reply to timjones:
> (In reply to a lakeland climber)
> [...]
>
> I'm not confusing anything, it's all very simple. Unless I'm mistaken you are the only one that is confusing things, has anyone else even mentioned ZIP compression?
Now, now boys, let's not fall out over it
 timjones 07 Jan 2013
In reply to mypyrex:
> (In reply to timjones)
> [...]
> Now, now boys, let's not fall out over it

I don't think we're falling out just trying to alleviate confusion. Unless you are using or planning to use ZIP compression I suspect that ALC is barking up the wrong tree?


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