What would I do to make it more bandwidth friendly?

[Koby]

I already use around 2/3 of my total bandwidth without a topsite. I have now installed one but haven't told anyone about it yet because I would like to make it more bandwidth friendly. I enabled gzip aswell.

I think button.php would be what would take up the bandwidth so much.. so Jeremy would your button rank cacheing code help save more bandwidth aswell.. and what are some other thing's or settings I should do? I would think I would get around 200 or so topsite members or less for quite some time.. and well I would prefer that the topsite not use anymore than 1 gig of bandwidth.

So if you could help it would be much appreciated.

[OS-Mark]

I would think the best way to lower your bandwidth would be to reduce the size in KB of your vote button.gif if possible.

If your topsite members get a lot of traffic, I do believe that image is billed against your bandwidth with every page view, from every members site.

[veroxxx]

You can also choose to not use button.php, your members would only need to put a link to your site like:
http://www.domain.com/topsites/in.php?id=##

You can then provid some buttons they can save and use on their sites... that would save bandwidth but with less features... Depend of what you prefer !
Vero-xxx-

[Koby]

That veroxx wouldnt rank anything but hits in or out. <_<

I don't get what you mean by vote button..

Jeremy you have any pointer's or tips?

[veroxxx]

Yes, like I said, it would offer less features... vote button is the button that people would see when they put the code up on their site.

[Jeremy]

bandwidth is mostly caused by the buttons. make the images as small as possible. that's about it.

[Koby]

Would that button cache mod do anything? I asked that.

And, what if I hosted the button's elsewhere, would it help?

[Matt]

THe only way to get your topsites using less bandwidth is to lower your ranking buttons to less than 2k the smaller you can make them the better it will be.

[cyberDJ]

For the moment i have 56 members, but i don't use much of bandwich (aprox 60mb/month). I'm using stat buttons, with the size arround 500b-1kb.
I have 20 buttons themes, from wich my members can select his favorite and i'm verry pleased with the Jeremy's script.

[marius26]

there are some image hosting site, you could upload the image to their site and link to that, that way you dont get billed for the button bandwith.

[Koby]

It's an old topic.

Anyhow I use 20 gigs a month for my topsite alone now. Bad thing is, I only have 15 total for my site and everything so I have to pay extra for each gig. I am hoping to get a better host soon.

[Basti]

well paying more is the only good way i think lol

my button only is 1.7 kb but i use around 10 gig last month and it will grow
good thing is i have 120 gig

[hueman]

Why not just take some band from another site? Sign up for a free site and host your images on another server. the users would not know the diffrence but you will save band because the images would be from your other image server =)

[Basti]

the problem with that is that most free hosts dont offer much bandwidth, so this woul be bad for large topsites

for small ones its a good idea tho

[kc8ual]

Just to give a little insight into the tricks... well not actually a trick at all... that I did which greatly reduced the bandwidth my topsite has used and will use.

I am always a big supporter of well documented scripts. I always will be, but you can drastically reduce the amount of bytes of data that needs to load, by simply going through each file and removing the "//comments".

But it also important to stress to you, that by removing the comments, it will make locating some of the code on a file harder, if not next to impossible. My suggestion, is for each *.php file that you will remove the "//comments" from, to keep a *txt file of the same name. For each comment, copy it into the *.txt file and assign it a number, then in the *.php file, replace the "//comment" with "//the number you assigned" eg "//1" this way, if you ever have to go back, you can simply open up button.txt and button.php at the same time, and use the button.txt as a "legend" or a key of sorts to help you. I have lowered button.php to 3.56 KB and captcha.php to 4.97 KB.

Then make sure to keep those text file safe. I have cut the size of the website code down ~43% this way.

Remember, it is important to keep these comments available to you, but not necessarily on the *.php file itself. Every time the page loads and it has to call the other php scripts, it loads the scripts... and the comments before returning the results as HTML. Some of these scripts that may be called more often than others can seriously cut down on your monthly bandwidth usage.