The Evil Bandwidth Monster is Hungry!

For the first time in History, As a webmaster I’ve managed to exceed my bandwidth limit causing James’ Blog to go down for a bit. I think from around 12:10 AM this morning I’d gone over my bandwidth usage and if you we’re unlucky enough to try and view the blog, you would have got a nice suspended message, saying that the hosting account of James’ Blog is suspended. It wasn’t exactly the best thing to wake up to this morning, but your now reading this message so you’ll be happy to now that my hosting account is unsuspended. Thanks to the great people at LRC-Gaming (Who hosts James’ Blog).

I’ve bought another 10 GB to see how much I am actually consuming, because according to recent stats apparently James’ Blog is using 4 GB per day, which doesn’t sound right at all, but if it is then im getting seriously pounded by someone. This has really been a wake up call as I’ve been a bit bandwidth careless up until now, but here’s what Im doing to prevent this from happening again.

Cache and Compression of webpages

As some of you may already known WordPress is the engine which powers James’ Blog and a developer Donncha O Caoimh, has developed a plugin for WordPress which Cache’s pages and compresses webpages files etc. This plugin in known as WP Super Cache and I haven’t really considered plugins of this sort until now really. While Super Cache will help keep bandwidth down, it also produces static html files of the pages and content of James’ Blog, so instead of seeing the normal dynamic pages, they will be cached versions. So now you should see a significant speed improvement of loading times of pages.

Smart Optimizer

Since my Renovatio theme took over the old 2008 layout of James’ Blog, the use of Javascript and CSS has increased alot, and this meaning alot of various stylesheets and scripts are present so they need to optimized in the best possible way, so they don’t increase bandwidth and slow down page loading times, well thanks to the Smart Optimizer scripts like Javascript are reduced in size and compressed, which helps lower bandwidth and page loading times, it also works it’s magic on other scripts such as CSS, PHP and even images too.

So really this has been a wake up call for me to look after my bandwidth more, because although I’d be happy to pay for a bandwidth increase if the additional 10 GB isn’t enough, but I seriously doubt that James’ Blog needs to consume 4 GB of bandwitdh per day, somethings defiantly not right there, but hopefully my measures will hopefully bring the bandwitdh back down to a normal level.

Update 13th May 2009:

I can happily report that the WordPress Super Cache and the Smart Optimizer has successfully been intergrated into James’ Blog and is now helping maintain faster page load times and lower bandwidth consumption.