There are a number of techniques for managing the amount of bandwidth your weblog uses. This article will illustrate easily implementable methods to understand, manage, and reduce your weblog's bandwidth usage.
Check the size of your Main Page
In order to make the most of your bandwidth, it's essential to understand how large your Main Page (your blog home page) is. An invaluable tool in understanding more about the size of your Main Page is the Web Page Analyzer, a free service which helps you calculate size, composition, and download time for your blog page.
Visit the Web Page Analyzer and enter your blog's address where it says Enter URL to diagnose. The Analyzer will fetch your page, and show you the size of all the objects loaded from your page, let you know how long it would take to load your page from various types of network connections, and offer suggestions on how to make your page load faster.
Making your Main Page load faster not only gives your visitors a better experience when visiting your site, but almost always helps reduce your overall bandwidth consumption. Ways to make your page load faster include:
- Limiting the number of items on your Main Page
- Using Excerpts for Longer Articles
- Limiting the Number of Items in Your RSS File
- Disallowing Sourcing of Files and Images
- Blocking Referers
Limit the Number of Items on Your Main Page
Your blog can be configured
to display articles on the Main Page (or any category page)
By days or By articles. To get at this
setting, login to your
blog Admin Control Panel and click on the Settings
tab, then the Navigation subtab. On the right side of
the page, you will see the Paging type options.
By default, your blog is configured to display using the By days option. This means that your Main Page will display a maximum number of days' worth of articles per page. You can configure how many days worth of articles will be displayed. By default this number is set to 15.
An alternative is to set your blog to display your category pages using the By articles option. Using this option, you specify a maximum number of articles per page and use the "Articles per page" menu to select how many articles you want to appear on a page.
Under either method, posts that are older than the number of days or past the number of articles do not disappear: they are accessible through the Calendar, Archive Months, or Archive Years components in addition to being searchable through the built-in Search engine.
You can also choose to add an additional navigation aid, which can be enabled by checking the box labeled Show paging links on default category view from the same page. This will allow your category pages to display links to the next 15 days worth of articles, or the next 15 articles. You can configure the text of the link from the same page on the control panel, in the Link Formats section. This is where you can configure additional details, such as whether the link will read Next 7 Days or just Next.
To reduce bandwidth, limit the number of articles on your category pages and enable Paging Links. Your readers will still be able to browse older articles if they wish to, but you have reduced your bandwidth usage by limiting the size of the page for readers who did not need to see an extensive list of your articles.
Use Excerpts for Longer Articles
If you tend to write long articles, you may find that they make your Main Page difficult to navigate. Your readers may have to do a lot of scrolling to see all the articles on your main page, and your Main Page will take a longer time to load.
One solution to these issues is to create excerpts for some of your longer articles. Excerpts are short pieces of text posted to the Main Page in lieu of the full text of the articles. They're followed by a "more" link, which if followed, takes the reader to the Article Page for that article, which contains the full text.
Using excerpts for longer articles may also decrease the bandwidth consumed by your site, as lengthier articles are not displayed as full text each time the Main Page of your weblog is loaded.
The User Manual contains a very useful article on using excerpts for your articles.
Limit the Number of Items in Your RSS File
Your RSS file contains a summary of your weblog. The information contained in your RSS newsfeed can be used by blog search engines such as Technorati or Feedster, or accessed by client "aggregators" such as NetNewsWire or Newzgator or web-based aggregators like MyYahoo or Bloglines.
As some aggregators may access your RSS file on a
very regular basis, and the entire file is often read every
time, it is a good idea to reduce the number of items in your
RSS files. To control the number of items in your RSS file,
click on the Settings tab of your Blog Control Panel. On the
right side of the page, you will see a column labeled Options;
at the bottom of the column you will see Miscellaneous options:
Reduce the number of items in your RSS Syndication file by entering a new value in the Articles in feed box: 10 should be more than sufficient for most bloggers. Then click on the Save Settings button and your RSS files will immediately be updated to use this number of articles.
Disallow Sourcing of Files and Images
The same HTML language that makes it easy for you to display an image on your blog can also be used by another website owner or blogger to display your image on their site, causing their visitors to consume your bandwidth. This practice of loading an image from another site is often referred to as inline linking or hotlinking; we refer to it as File Sourcing or simply sourcing. (See Wikipedia's definition of Direct linking.)
In order to protect your blog from this kind of bandwidth theft, you can choose to disallow sourcing, which will prevent your image from being displayed when it is sourced.
See the user manual page Prohibiting linking to content on your blog to learn how to protect your blog from this kind of bandwidth theft by disallowing sourcing.
Block referers
A referer is the URL of the web page that users came from before visiting another site. Referers show how your visitors found your weblog, since they indicate where the visitor was before they came to your site.
A referer can also be a web page that sources a file on your site, and some spammers try to trick you into checking their spam site by sending a fake request for your blog page containg their URL as the referer, in order to cause their URL to be visible in your Site Stats.
BlogHarbor now provides the ability for you to block referers from the Referer Statistics page in the Site Stats area of your control panel. It would be a good idea to periodically examine your Referer Statistics to see if there are any anamolous entries from spammers, and use the Block Selected tool to block these referers.
View your Web Server Log
Advanced users may want to perform more advanced analysis of their web site statistics.
BlogHarbor is one of few managed hosting providers that provides access to the full Apache server log for your blog site, allowing you to use any log analysis tool to create your own stats and reports.
The Download Web Server Log page in our User Manual has more information on accessing your logs.
