Bandwidth question

[JamesA]

One of my sites gets around 700 visitors and 4500 page views per day.
The bandwidth usage for the last few months goes something like this:

• December: 42 GB
• November: 22 GB
• October: 17 GB
• September: 16 GB
• August: 15 GB

This site has a few hundred sound files (around 1MB each) being downloaded regularly, but my stats don’t tell me when sound files are being downloaded.

My question is, if I had another site with similar traffic and no sound files on it would I have the same issues with large bandwidth usage?

hmm…. I seem to be answering this question myself. It’s the sound files, isn’t it?

 

[louie]

The sound file and also large images tend to increase you bandwith the most, and yes you answered yourself there.

 

[mneylon]

You might want to check what the bots are doing...

I had some very "interesting" issues with bots constantly downloading .deb files over and over again (each one was about 20 meg)

 

[kae]

good point there, Michele. you can get around that by linking to the sound files using JavaScript instead of straight links.

for instance, instead of <a href="blah.mp3">blah</a>, you could try <a href="javascript:document.location='blah.mp3';">blah</a>

(yes... accessibility, but there may not even be a problem here: I heard once that the more common "text-readers" are based on IE, and /can/ read JavaScript)

 

[mneylon]

The saner solution is to put all your multimedia files in a specific directory and tell all the bots to leave it alone in your robots.txt