Bandwidth

What are some ways you could lower bandwidth?

no images, no file downloading

no visitors <-- sorry could not resist it

Optimization would be the best BUT it is hard for us to assist you if we do not know what your website offers.
If you give us some details and/or URL, then we could probably help you out

Sometimes simple things are overlooked, such as reducing the bit depth of images or color tables. Often times you can get by with a much smaller file, especially with GIF, simply by tweaking the parameters and going as low as you can while retaining quality.

I believe some people compress CSS and HTML documents at the Web Server level as well.

As was mentioned earlier, consider reducing the size of your images. You can do this by actually reducing the dimensions of the image (if you have some that are bigger than necessary), or by reducing the quality (e.g. reduce GIFs to 128 colors, reduce JPGs to 80, etc).

If you use the same CSS or Javascript on several pages, put them in external files so that they are cached by visitors' browsers. To load external files, for example:


For more specific comments, please indicate the URL of the website this question regards.

Take out tags that do nothing in your web page. Like if you have some font tags you dont need etc or some <u> tags etc.

Also take out stuff like double line spacing.

mod_gzip

If you use php-nuke, then that maybe be the problem. It is bad.

I feel in the following manner one can reduce the bandwidth-
1.Compresses image files

2.Get rid of excesssive blank spaces in your HTML. It might look trivial but it will save some of bandwidth.

3.Try to use Static HTML pages instead of Dynamic pages

If you have a lot of visitors downloading large files, I would suggest you go with bit torrent, that can save you a whole lot of bandwidth

How much bandwidth you reckon is an average amount needed?

5gb? This is a very small website, maybe for small businesses

The only way to lower your bw. usage , protect your site for hotlinks.
All the other methods just cause you to lower your service quality only.

Hmm. I disagree. My evaluation of various compression techniques have shown a decrease in BW utilization greater than 60% (avg 56%), with no performance degradation at all.
In fact, HTTP 1.1 has been around for some time, and handles the decompression quite nicely; this of course means the end user obtains the material more quickly and user-land experience is somewhat improved since decompression is handled on the fly.

Through gzip or compress you can reduce the transmitted filesize, without decreasing quality of content all the while increasing userland experience through faster downloads.
If you save a few bucks in bw costs each month, all the better.
On the cheap you can accomplish this with apache modules, or use a product like NetScaler to compress on the wire.

Cheers.

protect yr site from hotlinking