Pink Edition
Using Bandwidth like it was Free
Some of my readers have told me that my site is occasionally slow. And I agree. I have noticed it myself at times. So I took a look at my statistics - specifically how much bandwidth that is being used. And it's a lot.
In April 2007 (one year ago) this site streamed 17,645 MB of data per month. That's quite a bit. But, in April 2008 (this month) my web server has sent... hang on... 271,107 MB of data. That is a quarter of a terabyte of data! Holy crap!
Now, I must admit that I am not completely surprised. I have deliberately been using more videos and images to illustrate my point. And, I started my design "magazine" which is all about the visuals.
Just to give you some examples. One of the most popular articles on this site - 7 Tricks to Viral Marketing - is also one of the biggest. If you read that article, and watch all the embedded videos, you actually requested 107 MB of data (there are 12 videos on that page)
- The front page of my design section takes up a whopping 0.55 MB
- The Apollo 11 article (the most popular this month) is 15.3 MB
- My latest article about efficiency is 15.6 MB
- The note on Flickr supporting video is 4.3 MB
So this site is not exactly modem-friendly. In fact, you need a pretty good DSL connection to really enjoy it.
It's funny though. I remember when I started working with the web. Back then you would be in trouble if you made a page that was larger than 30kb in total. Today you can create a page that is over 100 MB in size - and people love it.
High-speed internet is great. I wonder how we managed to live without it in the past...
Comments
Thomas Baekdal - Apr. 25, 2008
I just checked my stats - and I don't think it has much impact on the bandwidth. The pure HTML is fairly small in size, compared to the images and flash video. In my stats, the HTML part is so low that it wasn't even registrable :)
But I do think it has a much bigger impact on the CPU load (as you write) - and specifically the SQL server load.
Goos - Apr. 25, 2008
Whoops, over 270 Gigs of data traffic. Quite a lot, how many visitors do you have daily?
Cheers.
Thomas Baekdal - Apr. 25, 2008
I have about 8,300 visitors (absolute unique visitors) per day (in April 2008)
Goos - Apr. 26, 2008
That is quite a lot or not Thomas? It is quite hard though to judge if that is a lot or not. Then it is indeed not surprising you have so much data traffic with all the vids and visuals. Keep the good articles coming!
Thomas Baekdal - Apr. 26, 2008
Well, It is hard to tell. It depends on what article my readers are seeing, how many times they visit (the figure above was absolut unique visitors, so people are not counted twice) and how many pages they see on each visit. I have not analyzed any of those things, so I don't really know.
Nor do I have anything to compare it with. I do not know how much bandwidth other sites are using.
Goos - Apr. 26, 2008
Yes, you are right. If you have a new visitor who reads several articles than it shows you have some good content.
You could analyze that kind of stuff with Google analytics, I have a friend who uses it, but it requires you to put a piece of 'google code' in every page. That is not too user friendly, but it could work.
Interesting to know how much datatraffic you have. How big is your total site?
Thomas Baekdal - Apr. 26, 2008
Big? In what way?
BTW: I already have a good statistics system, so I do not need Google Analytics :)
Goos - Apr. 27, 2008
Big in a way of total MB. Is it over a few hundred MB's or is it a lot bigger? Every time you add an article it adds up to your total size. The longero you are running the site the more it grows. Or do you delete articles after a while?
Thomas Baekdal - Apr. 27, 2008
Hmm... I actually do now know - nor is it something I can easially find out (without having to download every file, and see how much space it takes up).
My guess is that it is several GB in size (the video folder alone is probably a GB in size). But I really do not have a clue.
Goos - Apr. 27, 2008
I like the design of your site, did you made it manually by using PHP or did you use a platform like wordpress or Joomla? O, and what kind of statistics system are you using?
Published: Apr. 24, 2008
in personal notes
Thomas Baekdal is a Writer, Interaction Designer, Change Advocate and Project Manager.
Jonathan - Apr. 24, 2008
Sort of related to this is a statistic I was given recently while working with a consultant on a project for a large client: search engine spiders are typically responsible for about 30%-50% of traffic on most web sites. Of course, they're not downloading video or images so they won't be consuming bandwidth equivalent to human requests, but personally I was amazed at this figure.
The effect of spiders is particularly heavy on sites where content is served dynamically, since their requests will pull lots of data into caches and pummel the CMS/database as they continually traverse links. Most large sites see this as a "Google CPU tax" that they are willing to bear in return for ranking. In many cases though, it means hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra hardware simply to service bots.