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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.

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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  • What are you hosting that 2-5 thousand visits a day(minus spikes unless there are a lot of them) is going through 300G of bandwidth? That seems excessive, unless you're streaming media, or something. And if you are, that may influence where you should be moving things to. I have a client with much higher traffic than that I'm pretty sure isn't chewing that much bandwidth.
    – Su'
    Feb 23, 2011 at 10:34
  • @Su': Black Label Ads is an ad system for porn sites, so ElbertF is running some kind of adult image sharing site.
    – delete
    Feb 23, 2011 at 11:36
  • @Su I'm hosting animated GIFs.
    – ElbertF
    Feb 23, 2011 at 20:21

2 Answers 2

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You can try hosting static content at hetzner, it allows 4tb of free (included) traffic, 6.5 euros per tb over the free limit. But you would pay more for the storage.

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  • Very good point and I might just do that, Hetzer is pretty awesome. Although I actually just moved the site from Europe (Gandi.net) to improve latency.
    – ElbertF
    Feb 23, 2011 at 7:22
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Start by optimizing your site to use less bandwidth.

Make sure you have mod_gzip installed on your server. It won't help make the images smaller, but any page that gets served along with them will shrink by a factor of 6 to 10.

Optimize your images. Make sure you are re-sizing them after people upload them so that they aren't too large. Run them through programs that optimize them for size. You could use programs like pngcrush and jpgcrush

Run your javascript files through YUICompressor or Google Minify. You should also run your css files through Google Minify or some other program that removes all the extra bits.

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