Bandwidth 101

I guess the best way to explain it is to use some real site examples. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from your site to a person's Computer / WebTV or to a Transloader, from a LINK or a Online Image Manipulation Tool.

=Everytime= your page is accessed the bandwidth meter is running.

Now, how much is used?

Good question!

Below are 2 links to 2 of my image pages. On each index page is a table containing thumbnail pictures which link to the original picture. The thumbnails are actually reduced and optimized to make them smaller and faster loading. It also saves on bandwidth.

***Note to Moonie.....This is why I keep saying to actually create a reduced picture for the thumbnail rather then using the size attributes to reduce the display size.

(Do I listen? Yes! Do I make all the thumbs? Nope. Once I find & Master a good thumbnailer. I will Thumbnail all images on all pages. Cross my cyber-chromed heart.)

My first page is page 1 of my Fantasy page found here;

/myimages/fantasy/index.html

Everytime someone views that page it uses 43k of bandwidth. If they click on each image link from the index page it uses another 465k of bandwidth.

This means that one user, viewing all the images on that one page uses 508k of bandwidth!

That's over a 1/2 meg in bandwidth usage

The next page is my Reflections index page.

myimages/reflections/index.html

The index page uses 86k of bandwidth and all the images linked from it use 687k of bandwidth.

This comes to a grand total of 783k.

Over 3/4 of a meg!!

Then we have to take into account handshaking and protocol requests that can add another 1-2% increase along with the fact that Webtv cannot open a new window like a computer can so they have to go back to my index pages everytime they want to view it which racks up the bandwidth meter.

Now fonts aren't as large as my images.

But keep this in mind....

Add up all of your font and page sizes.

Multiply that by 50 to cover user requests.

Now take that number and multiply it by 31 to cover the number of days in a full month.

Finally multiply that number by 15% to cover anything missed, use at Image Magick or heavy traffic days.

Here are some formulas to convert to gigs;

1000k = 1meg

1000 megs = 1gig

So if you have a page that contains 20 fonts on it and they are 5k each you would be looking at about 100k of bandwidth for this page.

If that page was viewed 500 times a month

(16 times a day) we would have this;

100k X 500 = 50000k which equals 50 megs of bandwidth.

If you have 20 pages of fonts you would use 1 gig of bandwidth per month. Give or take.

Remember that TRANSLOADING requests are considered a view and use bandwidth. So does viewing and saving to a computer which is called DOWNLOADING or UPLOADING.

What about a LINK to your page? Like a Webring, a Mail List, a newsgroup for instance? Yes every time a hyper link is clicked and it takes you to a page hosted by your Web Space Server, your Bandwidth Meter is running. Links pointing to your page on others hosted pages? As soon as a link is clicked on that takes them to your page, your bandwidth meter is running. This is how Webpage trackers work. They are also called Stats. By reading where the data is called from and sent to.

That is why hot linking causes so many problems especially in email sigs and posts and linked web pages.

If I have a 50k image and someone adds it to a sig and that sig is viewed 10 times a day it uses 500k=1/2 meg.

Multiply that by 30 days and it used 15 megs of my bandwidth.

Times it by 10 images on my page and we are now at 150 megs or a little less then 1/7 of a gig in bandwidth usage!!!

Hope this helps and you didn't fall asleep.

LOL!!

CoolKat

P.S. Guess I'll save a copy of this and put it on my page. It will be slightly editted of course. -Smile-

P.P.S. Wanted to add this little note;

A person had a directory filled with large file sized images on their host but were not published nor had any pages linking to them.

But the good old Google robot found the directory and indexed it on Google's search engine. Seems the pic's were very popular and many computer users came in and downloaded them all in one shot. This person got a bill for excessive bandwidth usage even though their normal usage was only a 1/4 of their max.

Should you have any directories like this and don't want them indexed by search engines make an index page that says

Access Denied

and in the Head tag place

a Meta tag in it that says

Robot = No Index

I think this is the proper format. Check

at Google or elsewhere to confirm the

proper syntax of this Meta tag.

The most simplistic way I can think of to explain what bandwidth is. Is to compare it to electricity.

Lets say that your home electricity was done by allotment. You and your family can use 2000 units of electricity per month or 30 day period.

On the 15th of the month a guy pulls up with a RV in front of your house. He throws out a extension cord from his RV and plugs up to your electric. His family and he are running electrical things much more than your family is.

On the 17th you look out front and here are 5 more RV's all hooked up to your electric.

By the 20th you get a call from the electric company telling you that your monthly allotment of electricity is depleted. That you will have no electricity for the remaining 10 days of the month. UNLESS you $$-BUY-$$ another portion of electricity.

You jump up and down #$%^&*@#$%^& LOL and say:
"But we didn't use that electricity! The fleet of RV's in front of our house are using up all of our electricity!

MAKE THEM STOP IT!"

The electricity company says :
"We are sorry but that is YOUR problem! Either pay us or no electric for you until the next month's electricity allotment refreshes!"

This is just what bandwidth is in general.

So this is just the "Tip of the bandwidth plug". So to speak.

So far as bandwidth and taking a URL to ImageMagick keep this in mind:

As soon as you take a url to a ImageMagick you are working on that image with a ImageMagick temp url. Every action that you do produces a new url. That is the perl script working, doing it's thing. That is also the reason that the ImageMagick's URL's get so long.

Same is true when taking a image to GIFWorks. Only GIFWorks produces a shortened url in the first couple of manipulations and changes the url which is sourcing from GIFWorks Server btw with every action.

MyImager does the same thing as well. MyImager works very much like ImageMagick in the url changes. But it's on MyImagers Bandwidth Meter so to speak geek as soon as you enter into the online tool site.

Web F/X is the same way. Enter Web F/X tool site & it assigns it a url that is on Web F/X's Bandwidth meter.

So is NetMechanic. Enter that online tool site and the image is assigned a temp NetMechanic URL NetMechanic's Bandwidth Meter.

FlamingText generates a temp url for you to transload from.

FlamingText Bandwidth Meter is running .... And So on .....

Yes a small amount of Bandwidth is used in the action of moving a file to a Online Imaging Tool. Yes if the file size is large and a lot of images are coming in with the same domain name that Domains Bandwidth meter is running.

However the biggest problem statistic wise is in direct linking. In a sig or direct linking to a webpage without transloading.

=NOT= with taking a image to ImageMagick!

Lets get that really clear so people don't panic.

..........Yikes!..........