Is bandwith costing you an arm and a leg? (Ecommerce)

[Whole Paradigm]

Hello all,

I've been doing a lot of research for my ecommerce build and it seems like one of the biggest complaints among owners is the large bills they're receiving monthly due to excess bandwith usage. In my case, the company I chose charges $0.01 per MB that you use over the limit. There are 1024 MB in one GB. So that would be $10.24 that you would owe in overage fees. If you average 40GB a month in excess, your looking at around $4915.20 a year owed in overage fees.

For those of you that don't know a solution or weren't aware of such fees there are a few basic things you can do:

• Make sure your images are the right format and sizes.. JPG and GIF files are common filetypes for compression.
• You can reduce the amount of time and features being used while you're in the Admin functions in the backend.
• Use the softwares built-in thumbnail generator.
• Reduce the amount of high-resolution images on the site; it uses bandwith and affects load times.

One of the best solutions I've seen thus far is to host your images on another server. This example is for Volusion but it can be done for others:

Typically, images on Volusion, (version 5), are stored in one of many different folders depending on what the image is used for and how it got uploaded into the store. Images uploaded with an Easy Editor end up in the /vspfiles/assets/images folder. Images used as category headings, manufacturer logos, color or size option related swatches and photos, and other types of images are in other folders. The product photos themselves are in the /vspfiles/photos/ folder.Once your store is built and you have uploaded all the product photos and designed your store, you can use an FTP program like FileZilla and download the entire /vspfiles/ folder with all it's subdirectories with a single click. You can then drag and drop the folder onto your new file server.Let's say you run a store at www.mystore.xyz and you setup a file hosting site on Westhost named www.myserver.xyz, now what you need to do is go through your store's HTML and edit the(absolute AND relative) URL's in the image tags -- replacing the domain name, or in the case of relative URL's adding http://www.myserver.xyz/ before path if any, and filename.

If you find a tag like:<img src="http://www.mystore.xyz/vspfiles/assets/images/myfile.jpg">

You would edit it to read:<img src="http://www.myserver.xyz/vspfiles/assets/images/myfile.jpg">

If you find a tag like:<img src="/vspfiles/assets/images/somefile.gif">

You would edit it to read:<img src="http://www.myserver.xyz/vspfiles/assets/images/somefile.gif"> And now those images will now be pulled from your file server, and not count towards your bandwidth.



You can also use a bit of Javascript to assist in this... instead of manually editing the HTML, you could use Javascript getElementsByTagName("img")and replace the src="" value in your image tags so that you don't have to do so much manual work.



Hopefully this helps some of you out and saves you a bit of money going forward.



All the best,

Cory​

 

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[biophase]

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[FastNAwesome]

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[PatrickP]

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[biophase]

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