

Ask HN: My site is getting popular, bandwidth expensive - ElbertF

I'm running a (small) image hosting site which has been getting a little bit of traction lately (2,000 to 5,000 visitors a day, spikes up to 10,000). It's hosted on Linode and I've already run out of the bandwidth for this month (300 GB). I've experimented with Amazon S3 but that was costing me $5 a day, Linode currently costs me $30 a month. I get a tiny bit of revenue from ads (Adsense and Black Label Ads) but it's not enough to break even.<p>What should I do? Obviously I'd like to keep running the site but not if it starts costing me a lot of money.
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latch
You probably wanna look at <http://www.slowcop.com/> (which was at the front
of HN today), which largely suggests what others have said so far...link to
jquery on google, fix missing Cache-Control: Public headers, gzip/minify/merge
css/js...add far reaching expiry headers...

0.10 to 0.15$ per GB is pretty standard low-end for low bandwidth sites.
Prices only really drop once you cross the 50-100TB/m range.

Your problem is that you're hosting cost (linode) is something you need to pay
regardless, so you want to use that "free" bandwidth. I've seen people swap
domains. Have images1.mysite.com which points to their main servers...and then
when they get near their limit they switch to images2.mysite.com which would
point to a place with cheaper bandwidth. Problem is, linode prices are pretty
damn reasonable (probably cheaper than S3 when you add storage/GETs/etc).

If you prepay at linode it's $0.10/gb...you should just buy a Linode 512 at
that point, since it's the $20/200gb ($0.10/gb again) + you get the extra
machine.

100tb.com, a softlayer reseller, is a known large-bandwidth [over]seller. They
have VPs for ~$100/month with 10TB included..there may be other options, but I
probably wouldn't recommend this route.

I hope you are making backups of your images...

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Smerity
I presume your website is <http://reversegif.com/> ? Cute =]

The issue you're going to find is that bandwidth doesn't get much cheaper than
Amazon S3 unless you start going with hosting providers who are questionable.
At $5/day with Amazon can we assume you're transferring around 30GB/day?

At this point a decidated hosting provider may be a better fit. For $40 a
month you can get a dedicated box with Hetzner[1] that will allow you
2TB/month @ 100Mbit which then gets shaped to unlimited @ 10Mbit. 2000GB/31
days is basically 65 GB per day - more bandwidth than you need for the moment
and at a cheaper rate than S3 can provide (2TB at Amazon S3 rates ($0.15/GB)
is $300). If you can survive with lag from Germany this would be optimal.

The other (far nicer) option is to try and find a strategic partner. Someone
like ICanHasCheezburger / FailBlog makes enough money from eyeballs that it
may be worth their time to either provide you with money or bandwidth in
exchange for a major link back to their page. Reach out to them, show them
your page stats and see what sort of response you can get. They're already in
a far more lucrative position as far as ad partners are concerned and can
likely use your traffic to move into an even better bargaining position. They
likely also have huge amounts of bandwidth spare as well which they may be
more than happy to offer to you.

As another commenter said, $5/day won't kill you and I think you have quite a
reasonable chance of making this back. Congrats on your success so far - if
you ever come down to Sydney come along to SiliconBeach - I'd be interested to
chat =]

[1] <http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2>

~~~
psyklic
I second that the site is cute =) If that is your site though, you may want to
disable debugging -- it is exposing your SQL queries. (See the end of the HTML
file.)

~~~
ElbertF
Yikes, I didn't mean to leave that on. Thanks for the heads-up.

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calebhicks
Posting it to Hackernews may not help your bandwidth situation :).

With thousands of visits, it's worth looking at your HTML/CSS and simplifying
it to minimize the bandwidth needed. May seems small in comparison to the
image bandwidth, but it won't hurt.

~~~
sagacity
> ...it's worth looking at your HTML/CSS and simplifying it to minimize the
> bandwidth needed.

 _Very_ sound advice. Doing this has produced _amazing_ results for us more
than once in the past. As an added advantage, it'll speed things up a bit too!
:-)

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Skywing
Gotta spend some to make some. The worst thing to do right now would be to
kill off all the traction you have because you're not willing to pay $30/mo
(which is nothing). Give yourself time to come up with revenue models and
stuff. Three months is only $90, but its also a lot of time to find out how to
make some money off of your site.

Just my thoughts.

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hayley
Though I'd assume that most of your bandwidth is getting eaten up by the
images, you might consider any/all of the following:

* minify HTML output

* minify your CSS files

* use the Google hosted version of jquery <http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/>

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sagacity
You know what? Since the time I looked at your site (~ 2 hours ago) it has
been kind of _growing_ on me.

Although I'm kind of reluctant to admit this, I messaged the URL to a whole
lot of my contacts. :-)

The more I think about it, the more I feel it one of those typical things that
have the potential to go _really_ viral; something like the hampsterdance.com
of 1999/2000.

My suggestion is to start promoting it every which way you can and building
some kind of community around this asap. (In all probability, you won't have
to _actively_ do any of these for long.)

All the best.

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dmc
One thing I quickly noticed, is that your advert is hard to click on
particular adverts[1](in Chromium on Fedora, at any rate). I cannot click the
advert below the top of the image, to the left or right. In some places this
can cover half the advert.

[1] <http://reversegif.com/9z7>

~~~
ElbertF
Valid point, I'll lower the main image a bit and figure how to keep at least
the sides of the ad clickable if it's still covered.

------
amock
If you can run on Solaris you can get 10TB of bandwidth from Joyent for
$45/month at <http://www.joyentcloud.com/lpages/solaris/> .

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minalecs
how did you get initial traction to the site ?

~~~
ElbertF
By posting a couple of links on Reddit. :)

