A Simple Change = Huge Savings?

Date                Vistors    Pages  Hits    Bandwidth

26 Nov 2006    1140    3741    15585     213.50 MB
27 Nov 2006    1382    4466    20946    239.65 MB
28 Nov 2006    418     1606      3503       72.01 MB
29 Nov 2006    428     2708      4459       84.14 MB

Well, I’ve been having major bandwidth issues this month. I passed my 8GB limit about a week ago and ended having to buy additional bandwidth to keep the site active for the rest of the month. This got me thinking and looking through my server logs to try and figure out what the heck was going on. I know for a fact that my site is not nearly that popular, but somehow my bandwidth was still disappearing at a frightening pace.

The big break through came when I looked at the plain ugly un-prettied up logs. I was getting a ridiculous percentage of my traffic from Google. That’s good right? That’s what I thought until I looked a little deeper. It turns out virtually all of my traffic from Google was coming from Google Images in particular. Basically what was happening was that all of my images in my gallery were being indexed and searched by Google users. The vast majority of my bandwidth on a daily basis was going to people downloading my images through Google.

So I came up with a plan. If I move my entire gallery over to Flickr then a good chunk of bandwidth will be saved. Based on a brief 2 day experiment of this theory is seems to be paying off. My bandwidth usage has been nearly quartered simply by moving my images off site. I figured it out that what I pay to use Flickr’s pro service works out to be roughly what I end up paying in extra bandwidth charges whenever that occurs. In the long wrong I just about break even, so for now that is good enough for me.

This is not a perfect marriage though, not nearly. I miss my fully customizable gallery (formerly powered by Gallery2), and Flickr certainly does not offer even a vague semblance of customizability (which apparently is not a real word). Also, Flickr does not have true folders in the sense that we have come to understand. Flickr uses a system very similar to Gmail’s “label” system. These are essentially virtual folders that don’t hold the images, the merely group them how you decide. All of the images are still in this mess of “all images” limbo which just makes me squirm in it’s disorganized nature. Also, apparently Flickr does not see the need for sub albums. I really can’t imagine how they wouldn’t think this might be useful to customers, but they simply do not support the idea of sub albums.

So in summary, strictly from the perspective of saving bandwidth this has been a great idea, but it has not come without trade offs.