What is the most efficient way to save bandwidth?
Outsourcing!!!!
Thing you can outsource
- video
- audio
- documents
- pictures
Dude that includes all!!
Nope you cannot outsource web pages (obviously!)
Video
Serving large sized video files like movies or video tutorials can really mess up your bandwidth. If that video tutorial is popular it will consume a lot of bandwidth. Let say you video is of 50MB in size. About 10 visitors download / view this video every day. Then total bandwidth utilization only for that file is 15000MB/month (50x10x30). OMG! thats a lot.15GB of bandwidth for only one single video file. Just imagine how much bandwidhth you have to buy if a single video file takes 15 gb of bandwidth.
There are large websites like YouTube where you can upload your videos and they provide you with code to embed that video in your blog or website. YouTube allows only 100MB & limits the length of video to 10 min. Uploading to these popular video hosts also has other benefits like, free traffic. Many of these popular video sites bring large traffice to your website. Most of the visitors who are visiting youtube finds your video then comes to your homepage for more information (given you have lfet a link to your website there.)
If you don’t want to stream vidoe files you have to upload these huge video files to free file hosting websites. There are really some good free file hosting websites. They have been popular these days. There is a seperate post on free file hosts( the topic is too large to discuss here).
Returrn to top
Audio Files
Most of the time you can upload all audio files to free file hosting websites but there are some services that stream audio for you. Supload is also one of these hosts that provide you embed code to put in your website to play these audio files.
Documents
Can documents occupy large space. Yes and no. Depends on size of the document. IF the document is of 1 mb just keep it in your website. If it is more than 10 mb share in free file hosting websites. There are some good & popular document hosts like SCRIBD where you can upload almost all types of documents and embed them in your website. The visitor doesn’t need to have any special software (expcept ADOBE flash player) to view that document. These document hosting sites are popular so you can get some free traffic from these site to your blog or website. Just don’t forget to leave a link to your website in the documents you have uploaded and your profile in that site.
Returrn to top
Picture:-
Yes pictures cost a lot of bandwidth for you. IF you are a template builder or a designer who caters free templates then i highly recommend uploading the pictures you use in templates to either photbucket or imageshack. Don’t upload pictures used in your website to these file hosts. You images are loaded every time a person opens you website so its better to keep in a place where large bandwidth is available (your webhost). But imageshack does allow about 300 megabytes of transfer per hour for each hotlinked file. So you might consider using it.
Returrn to top