[db08]

Can someone give me a Tutorial on bandwidth? HOW TO REDUCE IT, how do "KB's" convert into bandwidth, or how do page views, search engines, etc. convert into and rack up bandwidth?

Thanks in advance!

[bigred]

Bandwidth is the amount of traffic your site is getting. If your going over your bandwidth, then I would suggest getting the next higher plan. You are getting a lot of traffic to your site. Which I dont see as a bad thing.

[db08]

Can someone explain how page hits and other things (spiders, etc) use my bandwidth? When I see KB's in my stats, how do KB's convert to 1GB bandwidth. How can I see and limit who is using my bandwidth unnecessarily? Each time I LOG IN to my Admin area, am I using bandwidth?

[RickT]

To answer the math question:
a "byte" is the basic unit of memory.
1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte (KB)
1000 KB = 1 megabyte (MB)
1000 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB)

So if you have a web page that contains 100KB of information (text and images), and it is accessed 100 times, that equals 10MB of bandwidth. You use up bandwidth anytime the information on your site is transferred from Volusion's servers to anywhere else.

[memaddog]

Note: The new image zoom feature (thanks for that, Volusion, by the way!) will likely increase your bandwidth usage if you use it. Since every time someone does a mouseover of the prod shot on a prod page, the larger image will be loaded for the zoomed viewing. This is speculation but I would dare to say that more people will do a mouseover than who used to click "enlarge photo" on each product they looked at. Viewing more large images = more bandwidth used.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong and missing something. (I know, it happens - I can't believe it either.)

[bigred]

are you talking about the EnablePhotosPopup variable? The zoom thing

[gmanob]

bigred

go here http://www.volusion.com/shopping-car...e-features.asp, click on Products on the left side then vZoom.

[OHC]

Volusion has a knowledgebase article titled,
"Tips on Limiting Your Volusion Store's Monthly Bandwidth Usage"

Here is the link:
http://store.volusion.com/kb_results.asp?ID=358

[OHOH]

Our first month after launch our BW was 18.1 GB over the 15 GB allowed on the platinum plan. I have now reduced it down to what should be the plan limit by next month by

1)moving our downloadable products off the volusion server. The downloadable file for each product is a "downloadableproduct01.asp" file that redirects to the actual download on another server (THAT SAVED A LOT OF BW)

2)by moving all -1(small photo URL) and -2(large photo URL) images and any other non-product photos off the volusion server. ( We don't use the category photo feature, but hard code photos into categories/articles and these are hardcoded to another server) Also moved all images in the header, footer , and home page to another server by hardcoding that.

3) Combed our stats for IPs using a lot of BW and found some Bahrain and Thai IPs that were using a lot of bandwidth and probably up to no good and blocked them

4) Debated putting a (Yahoo suggested) crawl-delay on the Yahoo crawlers in the robots.txt file since they are our highest BW users (10 times more than google or msn) but decided that I don't know the ramifications to search results on that so I will wait and see how BW does going forward. Not sure if yahoo crawlers have separate media/image crawlers like msn and google

4) Am researching how the AOL cache proxies work. Are the proxy servers repeatedly checking for updates to any page that an aol member has previously requested from our site? AOL members account for 10% of our customer base but AOL cache proxy servers account for way more BW on our site. Is there is a way using a custom http-equiv metatag to keep them from caching a page? and how does it affect AOL users if you do? Does anyone know?

5)Blocked the following in robots.txt

User-agent: msnbot-media
Disallow: /
User-agent: msnbot-newsblogs
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: /
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Disallow: /
(If you do PPC do NOT block the adsbot)

I will do another post soon on what I have learned is useful in analyzing the stats and how to see the domains of the ip addresses in the stats which is where I discovered the AOL cache-proxy servers are not recognized as spiders and are hitting our site all the time.

[OHOH]

In the stats:

Visit - 1 / IPaddress / each session on your site
Page views - # of pages loaded
Hits - Number of actual files loaded when a page or file is loaded (so if a page has images and javascript and css there will be a hit for each of those files called)

if you see a lot of hits with no page views - some one may be hotlinking to images on your site or spending a lot of time looking(or copying) your images separately from the page: legit = affiliates, illegal = page scrapers

More on stats later