the site I am currently working at, www.allrpg.com, uses 100GB of bandwidth a month and we are looking for ways to lower that without losing our content. Basically we run a VBulliten message board, use a CGI News publisher, are a big graphical in design, have a random image generator each time you refresh the page. We also have only images and wallpapers for download.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated

You can try using some compression utilities such as mod_gzip (http://www.remotecommunications.com/apache/mod_gzip/) , which can compress html, php, cgi, and text up to 90%. There is not much you can do about images, since they are uncompressable. You should use gif's & png's in place of jpeg's wherever possible, as they are compressed more.

Hope that helps a bit.

-Dan

urm

Install GZIP?
Then all pages over a certain size will be zipped over the net to reduce size.

--James

If you optimized the images it would be a good thing... this is just the main one off the front page (see attachment) - yours is 16KB, this one is < 7KB (6249 bytes)

Originally posted by serve-you
There is not much you can do about images, since they are uncompressable.
Errrr... maybe compress isn't the word (I know very little about web graphic reduction), but you can make jpg's smaller. I always thought it was 'compression' ???

I recommend investing in Macromedia Fireworks to help cut down on the size of images.

And also JPG's are not less compressed than GIF's or PNG's. It simply depends on the type of image you want to show -- for example, most photos compress much much better as JPG's, whereas plain drawings with little change of color work better as GIF's or PNG's.

Originally posted by Chicken

Errrr... maybe compress isn't the word (I know very little about web graphic reduction), but you can make jpg's smaller. I always thought it was 'compression' ???

I was referring to gzip compression. Images cannot be compressed by any compression tool, since they are already compressed by whatever format they are in (ie, jpg, gif, png).

And also JPG's are not less compressed than GIF's or PNG's. It simply depends on the type of image you want to show -- for example, most photos compress much much better as JPG's, whereas plain drawings with little change of color work better as GIF's or PNG's.

This is true. My point was that a lot of people just use jpeg's by default, when an image could be compressed further by making it a gif or png instead (in most cases gif's & png's will be smaller in byte size than jpegs).

-Dan

Originally posted by Chicken

Errrr... maybe compress isn't the word (I know very little about web graphic reduction), but you can make jpg's smaller. I always thought it was 'compression' ???

You were correct, it is compression. JPEG, GIF, PNG are all forms of Graphic compression.