January 30, 2004 | View Comments (32) | Category: Our Thoughts
Summary: 9rules needs some help.
It finally happened. My bandwidth was exceeded. The whole 9rules domain was down for about 12 hours I think. I was able to talk my host into letting me finish the last 2 days of the month out, but I know next month it is going to happen even quicker. I have two options: 1. Get rid of the grid view to lower bandwidth (back to CSSVault v.1 type thing) 2. Upgrade the hosting plan. So in a nutshell I need some help. Any help, advice, food (okay not food) is greatly appreciated. Back to writing.
Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/130
How much bandwidth does your current hostingplan provide ? You could remove the grid view but it would be a shame since it's really much better like this.
You could also look for a free host and host the cssvault screenshots on the free webspace.
Percept (http://percept.be)
Right now I am allowed 10GB and I don't want to switch hosting providers because 1) these guys are local and I know and trust them and 2) that means 11 months of paid hosting goes down the drain.
Dathorn does look like something to use for the future though.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
How much bandwidth do you use, Scrivs? I have lots of hosting space, and a good amount of bandwidth. If you can give me a good idea how much you use, I can host you if it's not going to put me too close to my limit.
Alternatively, 1and1.com released their prices for servers the other day... lowest level is $49 a month for a dedicated server with 40 gigs of storage and 500 gigs per month of bandwidth. And you'd be able to host all your clients on it, too. I'm debating switching there myself, but thus far 1and1.com hasn't impressed me with anything but their price.
I host through webaxxs.com, which is a division of olm.com (webaxxs offers basically the same products cheaper. olm has a few higher end options for load balancing and raid and so on)
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
hmmm...how much bandwidth do you have currently?
Looked at the prices at shockergroup. Not really affordable, they must offer a great support service over there...
Minz Meyer (http://www.minzweb.de)
Well the shockergroup guys gimme a totally different price then the ones listed and the service is impeccable. Especially since I got their private cell phone numbers :)
In the future I am getting a dedicated server. I don't think I will go with 1and1 though, because like you said JC I haven't been impressed with any of the backend client side stuff they provide.
As for bandwidth CSSVault alone used 5GB this month, and that is with v.2 only being up 12 days. So next month you can imagine what the jump is going to be. If I was getting paid for these sites I could see myself switching hosts right away, but that is not the case. Any price I find on the net for a different host I know I can get my host to pretty much match it.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
Hmm. I hope you're getting a better price than the ones they're posting on their site... that's a rip, especially the business version.
Local and trusted is all well and good, but I'll pick vastly superior offering with significantly lower price and with good reputation every time.
And they won't refund you for the rest of the year, or even prorate the refund as if you'd been paying month to month?
It doesn't say that in their service agreement (which consists of "coming soon"... not sure what a lawyer would say to that one).
10 gigs is definitely a lot more than I expected your site would be getting considering how small the files are. Maybe you can look at ways to reduce bandwidth use, too. gzip encoding on the php files, htaccess commands to set 1 year expiry dates on images so they only load once per person per year... maybe do CSS archive galleries by week instead of month.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
one note on 1and1... their dedicated server doesn't actually use their backend stuff, it uses Plesk, so it should be fast enough. Actually you have an option. If they manage it, it uses their stuff. If you manage it, it uses Plesk. I've never liked Plesk, but it's better than theirs. Ensim is better than either, though, as is cpanel.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
Hey Scrivs, I don't quite understand when you refer to GRID view? Is it the images on Vault 2 that are causing alot of the bandwidth images?
Thanks
Bryan (http://www.gamecubecheats.info)
I thought about archiving them by week, but then I figured people would just bounce from week to week even more than they would just keeping one page opened in their browser.
What I will probably end up doing after Feb. is move the CSSVault over to its own host. But I would like to get through the next month.
I will have to look into the other options you mentioned JC.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
JC: Hmmm, well I will have to put them back on the list. A lot of research to be done in regards to dedicated hosting.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
Are you optimizing those images in Photoshop?
I grabbed the first thumbnail posted and Photoshop showed it being over 87k. Optimizing got it under 6k.
Mark Fusco (http://www.lightpierce.com/ltshdw)
Your RSS feeds have the images in. A naive aggregator will load the images each time, which is a bad idea.
I'd have a look at the logs, and see what proportion of traffic is from newsreaders. It might be wise to put only very recent updates (e.g.
Rich (http://www.holygoat.co.uk)
87k?!?!?! What image did you look at?
Also I think an angel has come to rescue me.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
Mark... you sure about that? I grabbed the first thumbnail to test the same thing and it was 6K... optimizing it I got it down to 2.5 though. (the total graphical weight of the cssvault homepage is only about 35k). Ah, I see what you mean now. When photoshop says "original" in save-for-web, it means "this is how big the raw image is," not "this is how big the original compressed graphic is"... like that's what it would be if you saved it as a windows bmp file or something.
I was going to email you with this, Paul, but I'll post it here instead since other people might benefit...
--
here's the htaccess stuff:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
just put that in a .htaccess file and save it in any folder that contains graphics.
for gzip, there are two ways of doing it.
If your host has mod_gzip installed, you can use that
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1029
otherwise if you're using php 4.1+ you can use ob_gzhandler
http://php.weblogs.com/tuning_apache_unix
Might also be worthwhile to redo the thumbnails as jpgs at about 50 quality in photoshop save-for-web... they still look the same, but the file sizes are 2-3k instead of 5-6. And maybe reduce them to 150 wide or something, that'd cut off a big of size.
And if you could strip all the extraneous whitespace out of the source code for your pages, you'd save a couple K per page.
Even taking your templates and stripping all the tabs and line breaks and spaces between HTML tags and so on would make a decent difference. Little things, but can be a big impact overall.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
The first one you have there - Surrey
If they're all that big, you have over 500k in thumbnails alone X your traffic and I could see how you'd easily break your bandwith alottment.
Mark Fusco
JC -
I do not follow your Photoshop logic. The interface, as you say, reads the "original image" - which is the gif that I grabbed - weighs 87k. How is a differentiation made between the raw image (which is what I put in there?) and a compressed image?
The way I am reading your comment, Photoshop would then have 3 windows
Raw / original compressed graphic / optimized
??
Mark Fusco
Mark... try looking at the file size of the image in explorer.
I have verle.gif in front of me, it's 6301 bytes. Photoshop, save for web, original says 87.9 k. That's the raw weight of the image as photoshop sees it.
That's just how photoshop works. It doesn't show the original compressed graphic's filesize at all.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
If you really care to figure it out (it's not really of any use to anyone), as an exercise, make a 1px square white image. original filesize will be 3 bytes, gif will be 43 bytes. Increase the image to 100x100. Original goes to 29.3k, gif goes to 156 bytes. Resize to 200x200. Original goes to 117k, exactly 4 times, as expected; gif goes only to 303 bytes.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
Wow, that's crazy -
Just one more example that the person who told me I'd know it all at 40 was lying through his teeth.
Ok, I do agree that saving as a jpg would still cut down the size by about half. Another suggestion might be to grab your screenshots at a lower resolution - you're capturing alot of empty screen space. That way you can cut down the physical size of the thumbnail while capturing more detail in the image.
Mark Fusco
Re: JC's comment: I just grabbed the source of the front page.
13140 bytes.
After tidy: 12801
After removing all linebreaks and duplicate space: about 12500. So there's about 650 bytes of padding in the file.
The stylesheet starts off at 4696 bytes. Deleting tabs and linebreaks shaves off 1K.
Stripping out all of the linebreaks shaves another 500B.
So by cutting down your code you can make a 15% improvement on that part of the site's size.
However, this is still only a couple of K per hit. So making thumbnails smaller is a better idea.
If it suits you, you could employ a tactic I like to use with images - crop the original down to a small, nice-looking region, then make a thumbnail out of that. The link to the full one shows the whole picture, of course, but the thumbnail is smaller.
Works better with gadgets and photos than sites, of course, but hey :)
Rich (http://www.holygoat.co.uk)
I'd say upgrade your hosting plan. Is is going to cost much more? I'd hate to see any of the 9rules site go down...
David House
yeah, cleaning up the whitespace won't be a huge difference. It is, however, a little added irony. :-)
mod_gzip will cut your css and php files down to about 20-30% of their current sizes, which will significantly decrease bandwidth, especially in whitespace which is all text anyway. The php version for servers without mod_gzip will do the same, but only for PHP files, and it takes a little longer on the server (negligible)
resizing or using better compression on the images will reduce the weight of the initial page load (should be able to cut image sizes almost in half)
setting an expiry date on the images will force browsers to keep them cached, greatly reducing bandwidth used by repeat visitors.
And Mark, yeah, it is kinda. It also doesn't care what the content is, because it's a pixel by pixel thing. If you take that white box and make it into pinstripes or a tight herringbone pattern, or a gradiant, something with lots of changes over the horizontal axis, the 'original' size will be identical and the gif size will go through the roof because that kills its compression schema.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
Strange. Dunstan (http://www.1976design.com/blog/) has hit the same problem at the same time. Meanwhile, my site experiences an all-time low in bandwidth. :P
Anyways, even though you aren't looking for a new host, someone else might benefit from this:
http://www.crisishost.com/
http://www.fuitadnet.com/
Both of them have excellent deals, and I have a very satisfied friend hosting at FuitAd.
Hope you have your needs covered.
Chris Vincent (http://dris.dyndns.org:8080/)
I found someone who will be gracious enough to host the vault. More info to come...
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
It's almost a shame we can't use local mirrors. That way no one person/company/etc would have to bear the bandwidth of the site. It would be interesting to know if this is very difficult to do without compromising the database, scripts, etc. Just my CAD$0.02
Justin (http://bluealpha.com)
Hey, this may be way off, but in regards to cutting image file size down, is it possible to place each one of those images as a background image, that way it is cached, OR do images period get cached by the browser?
Bryan (http://www.gamecubecheats.info)
Bryan -
Images on non-ssl servers get cached as long as they aren't set not to by either the browser or an htaccess command in the server. Caching is a bit iffy though if you don't expressly tell the browser to cache them for a particular period of time (for example, an image cached in IE6 might reload every 3 or 4 pageviews in a given session). If you expressly tell them to be cached via an htaccess tag as described above, only a forced refresh or an emptying of temporary internet files will remove it. It works so well that you can upload the image, view it, and then delete the image from the server and it'll still display every time you visit the page, until your cache gets cleaned or browser is force refreshed.
All that applies regardless of whether it's a bg or directly called. I'm *not* sure about how input type="image" is handled, but it's probably the same way.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
Mark: About the jpg thing - This kind of thumbnails may not benefit at all from bein saved in jpg format. Gif is great for saving flat color areas (like the empty space around the sites). It takes almost no space. Jpg is very good for photographs or images with many details.
sergio (http://overcaffeinated.net)
Keep track of comments to all entries with the Comments Feed
©2003-06 9rules, Inc. | Thoughts Feed | Notes Feed
Amazon Stores: Powertools | Jewelry | Books | Health | Landscaping | Kitchen | Movies
#1
I recommend http://www.dathorn.com
Will Pate (http://www.willpate.org)