I have several domain sites. Two are with Softcom, one with Geocities/Yahoo. I really like Softcom, ($10 a month for 50 megs space is great) but, eh, I dunno, I also like change.
So, I want to eventually move my Geocities site over to a real host. I was thinking of Pair (a fellow Doper pointed it out to me a while ago) because it’s no-frills, has 50 megs, but is a little cheaper ($6 a month.) The site I want to move is going to be a photo site - a lot of travel and scenery pictures, not much else. I just don’t expect that people will flood the site in droves to see them. Just a modest amount of visitors, is all I’d reasonably expect.
The only thing that is holding me back from going from Pair Networks is that they have a 100 meg a day traffic limit. That’s 3,000 megs a month. That’s A LOT, right? I think it’s a lot. I can’t imagine that I’d ever get that much traffic. But Softcom (my other host) allows unlimited traffic, which is reassuring, “just in case”. And I heard a tale recently about some guy with a domain site, who is in serious debt because the traffic on his site spiked Big Time, and no one told him. The fees that were added on for going over the limit were high, and he didn’t know until he had many thousands of dollars in fees. I cannot believe that the same thing would ever happen to one of my sites, but I just want some perspective on the risk I would take (if any) and what exactly a lot of web traffic, anyway?
Any advice would be appreciated, thanks very much.
I thought this was going to be an easy one, but since it’s a photo site…
Well, how big are the pics and how many of them do you have? Do you use thumbnails so users don’t download pics they aren’t interested in? This is personal site, right? How many users do you consider to be a modest amount?
100 megs/day = 20 users downloading 5 megs each. If your pictures aren’t that big, you can probably handle 35 users per day.
If you’re still uncomfortable, ask Pair Networks whether they give you a utility to monitor traffic and how much they charge for going over the limit.
I would suggest going with the ISP that allows unlimited traffic and spending the extra 4 bucks a month. These limitations, as you pointed out can end up costing much more than that.
If they come after you and say that there were 3 million downloads of a given file, will you be in a position to dispute it?
Okay, there’s no easy formula for this because it depends on the size of your pictures and the amount of downloads.
If you are posting pictures to a site, remember that you get about 3 pictures at 33 KB just to store your memories for 1 MB. (this is a rounded figure so take that with a light hand.) BTW, 33KB is a little high for pictures but sometimes you can’t get past that file size.
Now if I remember my classes well, once that picture is loaded to your visitors home computer (cache) if they visit again it will look first to their hard drive and not your site. (please correct me if I am wrong.)
Essentially you need to be aware of the size of your site and if you advertise it to a great degree, then you need to be concerned with band width.
Your best bet is to look through the logs of the Yahoo site (they do have them I think) see what is being downloaded for a month as a base. This will help you determine what kind of web host you need. If you are starting with a new site, you are shooting at the stars. Be sure to email the host and ask them to email you if your site goes beyond the allotment of bandwidth.
Then again there are hosts that don’t care (I have one that also hosts I think 500 MB, unlimited bandwidth, etc.
It depends on your browser settings. In Netscape, the default is to check the network copy once per session. In other words, if you go to a site, look at some other stuff, and go back to that site, it’ll get it from the cache, but if you close Netscape and restart it, it’ll download it all over again. I don’t know how IE behaves in this situation.
Also, if they have a tiny cache or a privacy (or other) utility that clears the cache periodically (usu. on shutdown), odds are a largish pic wouldn’t stay in the cache for long. And that’s all I have to say about that.
The way I’ll have my site set up is that I’ll have pages with lots of thumbnails - probably ten 5-10 K thumbnails to each page. Then if someone wants to see the larger image, they can click to see a high-res, larger file of the image. (Like 70-150K each.) I don’t think I’ll get a lot of visitors, but if they really like my photos (and I think they are very pretty travel photos, if I do say so myself) then they could end up using quite a bit of bandwidth.
I already have a simular site (on Softcom, the company that has the unlimited bandwidth) which has only been up for a few months. So far, I only get a few hits a day, but that’s partly because it takes a while to get pages listed on all the search engines, and I haven’t really finished the site yet.
My first site of this type (a 6 MB Yosemite photo site on EarthLink) did OK on the search engines for a while (it has currently dropped in ranking due to my neglect.) At its peak, it got a modest 20-35 hits to the main page a day. (How many people entered the site on other pages, I don’t know. I just monitored web traffic from this one main entrance page.) If this new site I’m working on ever gets up to 20-35 visitors a day, I suppose that bandwidth could be a problem after a while? (My brain hurts when trying to do the math!) I am thinking that I just don’t want to worry about it!
Just an aside - this new site, (the one that currently is on Geocities) is a photo site of my dad’s travel slides. He was VERY prolific (leaving thousands of slides of his travels here and abroad.) I was scanning some of his slides last night - some pictures of Copenhagen in 1961. They were lovely pictures. But I just have no idea how much traffic that 1961 Copenhagen travel pictures might generate! Sigh - I don’t know why I feel compelled to have all these domains and vanity sites. I guess it’s cheaper (and healthier) than crack!
Sigh - I don’t know why I feel compelled to have all these domains and vanity sites. I guess it’s cheaper (and healthier) than crack!