How much bandwidth should I be expecting to use?

[PNsystems]

Myself and the company I work for have been using a private e-commerce platform for quite some time, and have recently had a number of issues regarding the bandwidth we use.

We exceeded the 50GB bandwidth given to us by our host, and so were given 100GB (at a cost). We are now being told we are likely to exceed this again this month (which will of course cost us more money).

After looking closer at the our website (pinknoise - systems . co. uk) I realised that when looking at the grid of products in a category, the "thumbnails" of the products were actually the full-sized images force-resized on display, instead of PHP-generated genuine thumbnails.

While the e-commerce platforms developers did put a thumbnail-generator in place, which brought down the page sizes quite a bit, we've still been told we're likely to go over 100GB this month.

So, my question is - How much bandwidth should we be expecting to use each month? Looking at alternatives platforms eg: Magento, Bluepark etc. I see that "large businesses" are given around 40-50GB per month in bandwidth.

We are only a small company (5 staff), and get around 50-60,000 page views per month. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but surely there is something uneconomic in either the website's coding/structure or the way we have it set out, that is making us use so much bandwidth each month?!

I would really, really appreciate some assistance with this one, as we're trying to assess our options on where to go next (ie: to migrate to a new, more economic platform, or to optimise our current site in some way so as to drastically bring the bandwidth down).

Thanks in advance for any help,
Dan

 

[Raw Rob]

You can use this website http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to test the speed and find the size of your pages and the sizes of the individual files loaded.

I tested your home page, it is 1mb, to compare, my shop home page is 448.7 (zencart), a friend's shop running magento is 2mb, and amazon.co.uk is 1.1mb.

The other possibility is that someone is hotlinking your images. Check your server logs to see if this is happening. There is code you can add to your .htaccess file to stop hotlinking, but you need to know what you are doing as it can break some things.

 

[Cart By Design]

Hi, I've just had a look at your homepage. Every homepage view costs 1968 KB (almost 2MB) uncompressed. This is rather big. The size is mostly made up to scripts (1079 KB). Images make up 663 KB, which is not too bad but some could be optimised a little more. Changing the image format can make a difference in some cases, but this should be judged on a case by case basis.

 

[PNsystems]

I tested your home page, it is 1mb, to compare, my shop home page is 448.7 (zencart), a friend's shop running magento is 2mb, and amazon.co.uk is 1.1mb.

The other possibility is that someone is hotlinking your images. Check your server logs to see if this is happening. There is code you can add to your .htaccess file to stop hotlinking, but you need to know what you are doing as it can break some things.

Thanks for the heads up on that one. Because the products we sell are quite niche, it's likely that other sites are hotlinking our images, as we are more organised that most competitors when it comes to making sure products have images attached.

I've just done a quick test and there is no hotlinking protection in place, so the images are prone to hotlinking. I'll get on to them to ask them to put something in place.

Aside from that, does the 100GB+ usage that we're using some excessive to you, for such a small company?

Hi, I've just had a look at your homepage. Every homepage view costs 1968 KB (almost 2MB) uncompressed. This is rather big. The size is mostly made up to scripts (1079 KB). Images make up 663 KB, which is not too bad but some could be optimised a little more. Changing the image format can make a difference in some cases, but this should be judged on a case by case basis.

Thanks for that, I'll take a look at the individual images to try and bring them down in size a little more, and maybe combine some into sprites. I'd like to ask you the same question as above though: Does the bandwidth usage seem unnecessarily high, or is this the kind of usage we should expect?

 

[greengecko]

Why not use a CDN, this will dramatically reduce your bandwidth usage.

 

[Raw Rob]

Aside from that, does the 100GB+ usage that we're using some excessive to you, for such a small company?

Yes, it sounds excessive. For the month of April, my website used 6.10 gb.

 

[PNsystems]

Why not use a CDN, this will dramatically reduce your bandwidth usage.

I can't say I'm familiar with CDN's (but that's what Google's for, hey!), and unfortunately we're in the difficult position where the ecommerce platform is privately owned and so we must use their servers, and cannot move away to another server without changing platform. For this reason it might be difficult (or impossible) to put a CDN in place, as we're bound to their system.

Yes, it sounds excessive. For the month of April, my website used 6.10 gb.

Wow. It's good to get an idea of how other websites compare. Thanks for the info on your page size, how does it compare with ours in terms of page views per month?

I know Bluepark employees/users regularly post on this forum, and maybe they could offer some insight into the kinds of bandwidth we would be expected to hit if we were to move over to Bluepark's system?

Regards,
Dan

 

[dx3webs]

take a look at cloud flare CDN.. requires no configuration in your site (so long as you have control of your domain name)

https://www.cloudflare.com/

 

[Raw Rob]

Wow. It's good to get an idea of how other websites compare. Thanks for the info on your page size, how does it compare with ours in terms of page views per month?

Page views are a lot higher than yours, but then my site home page is tiny at 108kb, and I have lots of other pages which are also quite small.

You can work out something from your figures:

60000 pages at 1 mb per page = 58.5 gb per month

If the person above was correct that your home page is actually 2 mb, then that is 117 gb per month.

 

[PNsystems]

take a look at cloud flare CDN.. requires no configuration in your site (so long as you have control of your domain name)

Cloudflare looks very interesting. Is there any/much risk in putting one in place? Is it likely to affect my SEO? From a quick two-minute read about CDNs, it sounds like it'll do a lot to speed up page loads, and hopefully bandwidth, too!

Hi, I've just had a look at your homepage. Every homepage view costs 1968 KB (almost 2MB) uncompressed. This is rather big. The size is mostly made up to scripts (1079 KB). Images make up 663 KB, which is not too bad but some could be optimised a little more. Changing the image format can make a difference in some cases, but this should be judged on a case by case basis.

Could I just ask where/how you calculated this? Pingdom suggests the homepage is only 1MB as opposed to two? I'm hoping to see which scripts are biggest, so as to reduce them/host them elsewhere so that there is less load on our server.

Dan

 

[antropy]

Over 100GB doesn't sound ridiculous for a site that gets so much traffic and a company with 5 staff but it is a little on the high side.

You could turn on gzip compression on the server, minify some scripts. The images look quite well optimised already but as you say, putting some hot-link protection in place is a good move.

 

[greengecko]

Cloudflare looks very interesting. Is there any/much risk in putting one in place? Is it likely to affect my SEO? From a quick two-minute read about CDNs, it sounds like it'll do a lot to speed up page loads, and hopefully bandwidth, too!



Could I just ask where/how you calculated this? Pingdom suggests the homepage is only 1MB as opposed to two? I'm hoping to see which scripts are biggest, so as to reduce them/host them elsewhere so that there is less load on our server.

Dan

CDNs are widely used by almost everyone in the industry, it is essentially a necessity if you are running any sort of site with high traffic (especially if it is from differing geographic locations).

Use http://www.webpagetest.org/ instead of Pingdom.

 

[PNsystems]

Over 100GB doesn't sound ridiculous for a site that gets so much traffic and a company with 5 staff but it is a little on the high side.

You could turn on gzip compression on the server, minify some scripts. The images look quite well optimised already but as you say, putting some hot-link protection in place is a good move.

Thanks for the advice. As we can only see a small amount of our sites files (we have FTP a few layers down, and get no access to anything on the server outside of the folders we have access to), I used an online tool to see if compression is in place - It appears that it is (according to webtoolhub . com/tn561386-compression-checker . aspx)

It doesn't however, appear that any hotlinking protection is in place. Hopefully a combination of hotlink protection, image optimisation and CloudFlare, will bring our bandwidth down a large amount.

 

[PNsystems]

CDNs are widely used by almost everyone in the industry, it is essentially a necessity if you are running any sort of site with high traffic (especially if it is from differing geographic locations).

Use instead of Pingdom.

Ah I see! I've been web designing for years (almost exclusively front-end, however) but this is the first e-commerce website that I've maintained long-term, and with it being quite a busy one (as opposed to a new start-up) the learning curve has been steep.

I'm going to go ahead and get Cloudflare (do you think the free one will suffice? - It seems to offer a lot of things we're looking for)

Dan

 

[antropy]

I used an online tool to see if compression is in place - It appears that it is (according to webtoolhub . com/tn561386-compression-checker . aspx)

It doesn't however, appear that any hotlinking protection is in place.

Yep gzip compression looks good.
JavaScript seems to be minified.

But it does seem to be possible to access images directly i.e.:
http://www.pinknoise-systems.co.uk/userfiles/images/final_slide_tascam_dr60d.jpg

So hot link protection probably the best next step.

 

[PNsystems]

Yep gzip compression looks good.
JavaScript seems to be minified.

But it does seem to be possible to access images directly i.e.:

[/url]

So hot link protection probably the best next step.

Excellent, thanks again for the great advice. Apparently hotlink protection is in place (according to Siteground - my domain provider), but I did read that if there are settings featured in the .htaccess file, they will override this protection. I'll contact our ecommerce platform provider (who also control our host) and ask them to put this in place.

 

[greengecko]

Ah I see! I've been web designing for years (almost exclusively front-end, however) but this is the first e-commerce website that I've maintained long-term, and with it being quite a busy one (as opposed to a new start-up) the learning curve has been steep.

I'm going to go ahead and get Cloudflare (do you think the free one will suffice? - It seems to offer a lot of things we're looking for)

Dan

Cloudfare free will be fine, however I believe you may need the paid for version if your site is using SSL.

 

[antropy]

Excellent, thanks again for the great advice. Apparently hotlink protection is in place (according to Siteground - my domain provider)

Always nice to be able to help.

If hotlinking protection was working, I wouldn't be able to do this
http://www.antropy.co.uk/blog/hotlink-test

You can use that page above to check, let me know when you want me to take it down

Paul

 

[PNsystems]

Always nice to be able to help.

If hotlinking protection was working, I wouldn't be able to do this

You can use that page above to check, let me know when you want me to take it down

Paul

Haha thanks for that one Paul! I've e-mailed our platform provider and asked them to sort this one, so hopefully that link will be a dead one soon!

Cheers,
Dan

 

[PNsystems]

Cloudfare free will be fine, however I believe you may need the paid for version if your site is using SSL.

I see. It appears (on support dot cloudflare.com/entries/22309111-I-already-have-SSL-on-my-site-What-are-my-options-) that the free version can be configured if the SSL is on a subdomain?! (I know almost nothing about SSL's so sorry if I'm using the wrong language here). Is this easy to configure?