Question about bandwidth - how to reduce it?

[Guest]

My bandwidth limit is 25GB per month and I've nearly exceeded it already this month. I have almost 3,000 items in my website and growing.

 

My question is regarding images and how they're referenced in the body of a product listing.

 

I own domains of the same name for both .net and .com The .net side merely serves as a redirect to the working shop which is on .com

 

My small, category-browsing thumbnail images are stored on the .com side. But, the larger product photos (averaging around 30k each) are all stored in a folder on the .net side.

 

When I create a new product, I hardcode the big image into the body of the listing by using a direct call to that .net folder with http://blahblah/picture.jpg

 

Would it make any difference if I moved the photos to the .com side, placed them in a folder called whatever, and stopped hardcoding a direct path to the image using http and instead...used a call of img src=../whatever/picture.jpg

 

I hope my question makes sense. I read something, somewhere, about how hardcoding images with http eats up bandwidth. I need to do something to take a bite out of the bandwidth usage. Thanks!

[railroadguy]

I assume you have one account on your host. The fact that two domains are pointing to it means nothing. It's 25 GB total so it does not matter where you call the images from, the bandwidth is still 25 GB.

 

30k image seems big for a cart. Have you tried to reduce the side by a higher JPG compression?

 

Dan

[Jack_mcs]

I hope my question makes sense. I read something, somewhere, about how hardcoding images with http eats up bandwidth. I need to do something to take a bite out of the bandwidth usage. Thanks!

You should install an auto thumbnail contribution. They will reduce the size of the displayed images, thus cutting down on bandwidth and speeding up load times, while improving image quality

 

If your host has awstats installed, you should look at them. It could be that someone is hotlinking to your images or just linking to your site. One of my sites was going way over the bandwidth and I found a XXX site had listed it as a partner site. So it was getting tons of traffic from people looking for an adult related site. But since this site is not related to that theme in any way, the visitors would just leave. But the sheer quantity of hits was enough to gobble up the bandwidth.

 

Jack

[Guest]

Jack: I do have AWstats via Cpanel.

 

But, what should I be looking at? It's a mountain of information.

 

The only thing that jumps at me, upon first glance, is that 87.2% of the bandwidth is related to jpg images and the Googlebot has 3147 hits versus a whopping 24,619 for MSNbot.

 

How do you use AWstats to locate people/sites that are hotlinking?

[Jack_mcs]

Take a look at the Viewed (Full List) to see what others are looking at. If there is a large number for images, it could be hotlinking.

 

Also look at the pages not found (bottom). Many times, a simple missing image or file can cause a redirect to a 404 page, which would eat up more bandwidth than if it were present, not to mention it is an actual error on the site.

 

Also look in the Referring sites. This will show how visitors got to your site. If you see a large number for a link and the link doesn't look legitimate, just click on it to go to the site. If it is not a site you want linking to you, then you need to take steps to remove it.

 

Jack

[red devil]

If you have cPanel you can enable Hotlink Protection but make sure you add your website to the list of allowable URLs.

[Jack_mcs]

The code for hotlink protection can be added whether one has cpanel or not. But if cpanel is used, be sure to backup your .htaccess file since it will overwrite it, thus removing any changes that may have been made.

 

Jack

[Guest]

The code for hotlink protection can be added whether one has cpanel or not. But if cpanel is used, be sure to backup your .htaccess file since it will overwrite it, thus removing any changes that may have been made.

 

Wish I'd known that last night. LOL. I enabled it and then went to check my site and all links were dead. All I could do was access the home page. I wrote to my webhost and they said that when it was enabled, the rewrite engine was turned off. So, they turned it back on and all seems to be well now.

 

Regarding awstats, Jack...I see the following:

 

In terms of the Viewed List (Full List) it's tons of entries regarding my Test site, not my .com site. ???

 

The Pages Not Found list is returning a huge number of hits for the robots.txt file

 

I have a robots.txt file in my .com site...I do not have one in the Test site, or the .net side.

 

And when looking at referring sites and links...it's tons of eBay stuff. I do sell on eBay a bit but it's alarming how much junk is there. Some of the links even appear to be bogus. For example...http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa has eaten 12% bandwidth for the month thus far.

 

It's a link to the eBay Forums which results in a message saying: The specified topic [0] was not found.

 

???????????

[Jack_mcs]

The code for hotlink protection can be added whether one has cpanel or not. But if cpanel is used, be sure to backup your .htaccess file since it will overwrite it, thus removing any changes that may have been made.

 

Wish I'd known that last night. LOL. I enabled it and then went to check my site and all links were dead. All I could do was access the home page. I wrote to my webhost and they said that when it was enabled, the rewrite engine was turned off. So, they turned it back on and all seems to be well now.

 

Regarding awstats, Jack...I see the following:

 

In terms of the Viewed List (Full List) it's tons of entries regarding my Test site, not my .com site. ???

 

The Pages Not Found list is returning a huge number of hits for the robots.txt file

 

I have a robots.txt file in my .com site...I do not have one in the Test site, or the .net side.

 

And when looking at referring sites and links...it's tons of eBay stuff. I do sell on eBay a bit but it's alarming how much junk is there. Some of the links even appear to be bogus. For example...http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa has eaten 12% bandwidth for the month thus far.

 

It's a link to the eBay Forums which results in a message saying: The specified topic [0] was not found.

 

???????????

Be sure the robots.txt file is in the root of your site, not the root of your shop. In other words, it should be viewable by going to http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt.

 

You should block your test site with the robots file since none of the links the search engines would list would be ones you wanted listed, not to mention the bandwidth it uses.

 

On some such links you can block the IP but you can't do that in this case since you want EBay to link to you. So you will probably need to contact EBay to remove reference to that link. The thread may no longer be there but reference to it might be.

 

Jack

[Guest]

I can see the file by going to http://www.mysite.com/robots.txt

 

So...why would there be a ton of 404 errors for that?

 

I'm confused by the awstats panel. It's referencing everything for the .net site. I guess that's because the .net site is in the root folder and the .com resides in a different folder, underneath the root.

 

What I mean is...there are no references to .com in it at all. There is no robots.txt file in the .net side, either. Are you saying I should put one there?

 

See, the path to the test site is via .net.......not .com I'm thinking that all those 404 errors for robots.txt are being generated because there is no such file within .net or within the test folder. The path to the testsite would be http://www.mysite.net/test

 

If I am to put a robots.txt file there...what exactly am I blocking? My robots.txt file that resides in the .com folder reads like:

 

Disallow: /admin

Disallow: /account.php

Disallow: /checkout_shipping.php

...and so on

 

What would I put in the robots.txt file for the test folder? Would I put that in the root folder of .net or in the .net/test folder?

 

One other thing...I'm also seeing a lot of hits coming from two different fan forums for actors. But, when I go to the referring website, I can't find anything regarding my site. Is there a way to search for references to my website in another's site? I don't know if they're hotlinking images (I doubt it, because I seldom use photos of specific actors) or if they're simply posting messages telling people to visit my site or a certain page and posting the link to it. How can I find out what's up there without spending hours clicking on a gazillion threads? Their search engines for their forums are disabled, for some reason. I end up with a Google searchbox in their websites.

 

I appreciate your help, Jack!

[Jack_mcs]

The robots file goes in the root of the site, as stated, not anywhere else. You will need to talk to your host as to how the .com and .net are being accessed. I assume the .com is just a parked domain, which would mean it would point to the same files as the .net. But if that is not how it is setup, then it could be causing problem.

 

Jack

[Guest]

I wrote to the webhost and inquired about it, and they basically told me the same thing you did, Jack. Put the robots.txt file in the root folder.

 

But, to be perfectly honest, I'm still confused.

 

I did create a robots.txt file and put it in the root folder. And I put in a line to say:

 

Disallow: /test

 

Because the Test site resides in a folder called test underneath the root folder.

 

But, the confusion for me is all about the .com site. It also resides in a folder parked underneath the root folder. Let's just say, for the sake of conversation, that the name of that folder is Jack.

 

You don't access my .com by typing in www.mysite.net/Jack You simply type in www.mysite.com

 

That's why I also have a robots.txt file within that folder of Jack.

 

I have a headache. Oh, well....the robots.txt file is now in the root folder, too. We'll see if it makes a difference. I appreciate your time!

[Jack_mcs]

When you want to have two domain names pointing to the same site, you set up one as normal, as with your .net site. Then you setup the other as a parked domain.That is done in your hosts control panel.There are not any files or directories relating to it. When someone reaches your server by using the .com url, the server will check to see if it is a parked domain and, if it is, it will redirect it to the .net files. If you have setup a separate directory for the .com domain name, then you are either redirecting from within that directory or you are using two sets of files. Either way is incorrect. Your host should be aware of what a parked domain is. You should contact them and ask how you can park the .com domain name. Once that is done, delete whatever directory (and all of its contents) that wa related to it. Although you might just want to rename it for now in case the files are not at the same level as the .net ones.

 

Jack

[Guest]

Jack: I know it's the holidays and everyone is busy, but...I hope you're still here.

 

I initially bought the domain of mysite.net

 

I acquired webhosting and installed osCommerce anew in the root folder of public_html

 

About a year later, mysite.com became available and I'd prefer to be a dot com. So, I bought it and I wrote my webhost about it. I wanted to keep the domain of .net (which serves as a redirect to dot com now) and I ended up installing OSC again in a folder underneath public_html called, you know....Jack.

 

After reading your last post and 24 Advils later...I wrote to my webhost and asked...is mysite.com a parked domain?

 

They said it is a parked domain in the jack.mysite.net site

 

After I got the dot com site up and running...I deleted all of the OSC files that were there under public_html, with the exception of an index file which serves as a redirect to my dot com site in the event someone types in www.mysite.NET in their web browser.

 

Is this making any sense to you? Does this setup still sound messy? Wrong? I'm not being sarcastic. I honestly don't know if this is right or not.

[tangwaichee]

Jack: I know it's the holidays and everyone is busy, but...I hope you're still here.

 

I initially bought the domain of mysite.net

 

I acquired webhosting and installed osCommerce anew in the root folder of public_html

 

About a year later, mysite.com became available and I'd prefer to be a dot com. So, I bought it and I wrote my webhost about it. I wanted to keep the domain of .net (which serves as a redirect to dot com now) and I ended up installing OSC again in a folder underneath public_html called, you know....Jack.

 

After reading your last post and 24 Advils later...I wrote to my webhost and asked...is mysite.com a parked domain?

 

They said it is a parked domain in the jack.mysite.net site

 

After I got the dot com site up and running...I deleted all of the OSC files that were there under public_html, with the exception of an index file which serves as a redirect to my dot com site in the event someone types in www.mysite.NET in their web browser.

 

Is this making any sense to you? Does this setup still sound messy? Wrong? I'm not being sarcastic. I honestly don't know if this is right or not.

 

buy new domain la

[Jack_mcs]

After I got the dot com site up and running...I deleted all of the OSC files that were there under public_html, with the exception of an index file which serves as a redirect to my dot com site in the event someone types in www.mysite.NET in their web browser.

 

Is this making any sense to you? Does this setup still sound messy? Wrong? I'm not being sarcastic. I honestly don't know if this is right or not.

A redirect is not required, nor should it be used, for a parked domain. You should have a set of oscommerce files in your root directory (asuming your shop is meant to be in the root). Both domain names should point right to those files. If you have any other setup, it is either incorrect or your host is handling it differently than most. Since they are sayig it is a parked domain, you should be able to delete (rename) anything relating to the .com domain name and not cause any problems. This is all really a matter for a host to fix though. If yours is not willing to set this up properly, you might want to consider switching hosts. For a host, setting this up is baisc hosting 101 and would take them five minutes to do, assuming they took a coffee break in that time. :) So you should have a talk with them to find out what is going on.

 

Jack