Bandwidth problems....

[Donnie]

Hi guys...

Ok... got a cituation here... just received an email from our Host provider... looks like were gonna overshoot our bandwidth allotment for the month almost by double... LOL Someone's doing a lot of browsing!!!! LOL The plan I have now allows us 8gigs of transfer for each month... its Feb11th and were already at 4.5gigs... we'll hit an estimated 12+ gigs by the end of the month... so... I am going to try to do a few things to help the problem... including upgrade our service... (more money!! LOL)

To help with the bandwidth problem I am also gonna allow attachments and image posting only in certain forums (let me know which you want)... my choice will be to allow them only in the Gallery section & the Swap Shop... possibly the main board... I will also fix it to only allow certain sized images (suggestions welcome)... And I am going to try to decrease the size of our logo at the top of the screen...

For those of you who dont know what bandwith is... each time you load a page it transfers the information from the "server" to your computer... the amount of information transfered is the bandwidth....

Thanks for your help!

[Ray Bidwell]

Donnie we have avatars and signature pictures do we need both. Just a suggestion.

[Donnie]

Hey man,

actually we dont need either!... but both are fun... which would you guys prefer to keep? One thing that would also help is limiting the size of avatars even more... we could go to 50x50 instead of 100x100... just an idea...

Donnie

[Mathieu]

About attachements and image postings should be limited to the Picture Gallery and the Swap Shop.

The picture format would be 800 x 600 max. Also use the JPG files must help a lot.

My 2 cents.

[AndyKunz]

Originally posted by Donnie
actually we dont need either!... but both are fun... which would you guys prefer to keep?

You can put an avatar image into a signature picture, but you can't click on an avatar to jump to somebody's web page.

I would rather do without the avatar and preserve the signature pictures. Several of us use the latter as a quick link to our sites, and that isn't just to commercial sites.

Andy

[rcrdps]

I'd say add a page with 128bit encryption. :) ie,...donations. How bout paypal? If your paying and puting tons of time into it(do you have time for a day job?), why should we get it totally free? The avatars can definitely go though. But if we consider all that stuff, like, soooooo cool... then $$$

Gene

[Tit Bonac]

Throw out the avantars, limit images to the Fast Electric Swap Shop and the Picture Gallery, limit pic's to gif , jpg and jpeg format, limit pic's to 200 kb.

My 2 cents.

[rcrdps]

While looking at another post I noticed something. You might have already come to this conclusion, so bare with me. You said bandwith was a problem,...not server space. If we just put all pics in the gallery and linked to them in our posts(like when we're giving an example of our setup), we wouldn't have to refresh them every time we checked the post. That way we'd only look at the pics once....rather than 10-20 times depending on how many posts.

Gene

[JimClark]

I say dump the Avitars and limit or even dump the pictures. There areplenty of ways to post pictures that are free.
Jim Clark
P.S. Let me be one of the first to do my part I have pulled my Avatar off.

[Avenger]

ok i got an idea, get rid of the avirtars, no pics ofer a certin size and, no bitmap files, you can have the same pic as a jpg, but as a bitmap it will be 10x the size. also, you could get rid of the smilies, it might not be that much tho, you could also get rid of the test forum, it is just filled w/ gigantic pictures that noone looks at!

[will_myster]

Hmmm thats aint good to hear. But to put it simple, these days alot of us guys arnt using a proxy setup, except for the dialup guys, Now i know if all of us used a proxy config we would probobly use 1/3 of the bandwith. Its as simple as watching all the photos being cached, and if you hit refresh well it will come up faster and not suck up the bandwith of RRR. You only save allitle bandwith here but. The home pages and all the other pages that are HTML all the info will be stored saving alot of bandwith, just something for us to consider
Just my 2cent

[Donnie]

Originally posted by Jim Clark
I say dump the Avitars and limit or even dump the pictures. There areplenty of ways to post pictures that are free.
Jim Clark
P.S. Let me be one of the first to do my part I have pulled my Avatar off.

Hey man,

That was pretty cool what you did by taking your avatar off... it shows how good of a man you are! Leading the way... The sad part is your Avatar was my Favorite out of all of them! :)

Here's what I am thinking... Avatars were one of the reasons I got this BB system... I love em... gives life and personality to the persons posts... what were gonna do is limit the size to 50x100 and crunch down the limit to like 10K... then I will eliminate all the free/starter images that I uploaded... that will also help greatly...

Pictures will only be posted in the Swap Shop and Gallery pages... and I am going to add a function to put a link instead of the actual picture in the post... that way guys dont have to find a free host... they can still upload... but it just wont popup each time you hit the page! And I'll limit the size of that to around 640x480 or 600x800...

Lets give it a shot and see how it goes... if we close to our limit I'll have to upgrade the account... but atleast we'll know we tried...

Thanks for your help!
Donnie

PS: I too am taking my avatar off until I can resize to a much smaller image...

[Pooley929]

I do like to post a pic on the page of the question, If someone wants to see how to put a cap on a motor and I have a good shot of it I like to show them. I must admit I was going a little crazy with the pics, we all were it was fun, But now we all can chill a bit and post only recessary pics and the site should be fine:D

[Allan]

Donnie,

probably the images.....

Allan

[Al E.]

Don,

When I post a pic and my avatar, I'm using a link to www.imagestation.com. I.e., the pic resides on another server. Does that still suck as much bandwidth as posting them on your server?

[Donnie]

Originally posted by Al E.
Don,

When I post a pic and my avatar, I'm using a link to www.imagestation.com. I.e., the pic resides on another server. Does that still suck as much bandwidth as posting them on your server?

Hey man,
No it does not use as much bandwidth... most of the bandwidth ends up coming from your "imagestation" site...
Thanks,
Donnie

[Al E.]

Well then I guess my next thought would be to encourage pic-posting guys to use alternate sites such as www.imagestation.com., etc. What would you think about showing a list of sites that host images in the FAC's - "How to post pictures". I.e., you could explain the bandwidth thing there and ask guys to choose a site from the list and use that for their pics. Once a pic is uploaded, do a right click, then Properties, then copy the image name, past it on their RRR post and surround it with the <img>, </img> code.

Just a thought. Thx, Al.

[Mathieu]

Originally posted by Donnie


Hey man,
No it does not use as much bandwidth... most of the bandwidth ends up coming from your "imagestation" site...
Thanks,
Donnie

Hi,

If I upload my pics on my site (my personnal account to multimania or others) does my pics use "your" bandwidth...
I don't think so because the files are stored in an other server so they are loaded from the other server, no ???
Also, Why don't we fix the "weight" of the avatars, lets say 3Kb. Mine is about 2.69 Ko, is it to much ???

Just trying to help.

[Dunk]

By now I have shown how ugly I am. Doesn't save a lot of BW but it will help. When I get a FE site up and running then I may add a link. I think donations or even minimal fees for added features may be appropriate.

[TomMoorehouse]

you could compress the logo image. The current size is 14871 bytes

http://www.firefighterboats.com/images/rrlogo16.gif
16 colors=8044 bytes

http://www.firefighterboats.com/images/rrlogo32.gif
32 colors=10479 bytes

http://www.firefighterboats.com/images/rrlogo64.gif
64 colors=12715 bytes

[TomMoorehouse]

red circles can also be made smaller. current sizes are 908-911 bytes

http://www.firefighterboats.com/images/redcircle.gif= 100 bytes

http://www.firefighterboats.com/images/redcircle1.gif= 98 bytes

http://www.firefighterboats.com/images/redcircle2.gif= 98 bytes

http://www.firefighterboats.com/images/redcircle3.gif= 98 bytes

[TomMoorehouse]

bandwidth looking any better Donnie?

[Avenger]

sorry to drag this up again, but i was just wondering how we are doing for the month? are we better, worse, or right on w/ our badwidth?

[avalentine]

To prevent putting out fires now, and then again later should this sites popularity continue to grow....

Compress your "standard" website graphics
Drop the Avitars completly or limit to 5k
Allow signature images like you had in the past - limit to 5k
Allow image attachments but limit to 25k and 500x500

Tom had great points in digging through your image folders and compressing all of them down to size. I use a small utility called GIF cruncher and a couple others that will process and entire folder of images individually to compress and provide online viewing of each to choose the one I want to keep. That one is then used to overwrite the bloated file. Compress by number of colors among other things. Or batch it within Corel or Adobe software... same thing. The attached photos while larger in size are not loaded as frequently as your basic images that build each of your pages. Put emphasis on working through those.

Avitars are cute, and yes they add some personality but they aren't necessary if you can also add an image in your sig. A sig can have a long thin banner whereas the avitar has to be small and square.

If the attached photos are cropped properly you can show great detail within 25k and 500x500 max. 400 would be prefered. If even greater detail is requested, or necessary leave it up to the third party to provide it via email or other web album? The file size is hurting you, and a standard is still 800x600 for web design. 400-500 pixels wide fits comfortably within that frame. I hate the bottom scroll bar ;)

Andy

[AndyKunz]

Originally posted by avalentine
I hate the bottom scroll bar ;)


I hate the red left and right margin lines. Let the thing be as wide as it wants!

Andy

[Steven Vaccaro]

Donnie does the Picture in my sig cause bandwidth problems? If so I will delete it!

[TomMoorehouse]

if you host an image on your own server it does not have any effect to the RRR bandwidth. short of the tiny amount of html text required to display the image.

[Steven Vaccaro]

Thanks Tom!
Until I read this thread I thouight I was having problems with my browser because none of the picture loaded automaticly!
StevenV

[Donnie]

Hey,

Yeah Tom is correct... your picture does not affect our bandwidth... so I wouldnt worry about it... :-)

We are doing much better but I think still over the limit... I am going to keep up some of the "behind the scene's" mods and I am probably gonna go ahead and upgrade our server... That way we have plenty of room and we dont have to worry about it... :-)

Thanks for all your help guys....
:burnout:
Donnie

PS: I am gonna close this thread... if you have any other comments please feel free to PM me... thanks guys!!