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  • Joined: 16 May 2002
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Suggestion: how to save bandwidth
Post Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 4:03 pm
First of all, let me say that Bock and Maxim are doing an awesome work by keeping the site ads-free. I know that high-quality bandwidth is something you have to pay for, and I can see why you're so concerned about wasting it, and that you ask for donations and rom mirrors.

ANYWAY
I was thinking about something: all the "spotlight pages" for the roms (I can't find a better name for them... maybe "download pages"?) usually have several screenshots from the game, and everyone have free access to those pics.
You may think that it's not relevant, but let me do an example, with the recently posted Missle Defense 3-D. The ROM size is 81786 bytes. According to this list, there are a few more than 200 people who can download it from your server. This generates about 17MB of bandwidth.
Now, on that page there are also several screenshots. Their size is 37493 byte. An infinite number of people can see them. This generates about *MB of bandwidth.

So I'm thinking... why don't you change something in the posting policy? Maybe you can rely on some free image hosting service, like www.imageshack.us, or you can "cheat" and set one of the external mirrors to appear at the first place instead of the internal (P) one, so people may be lead to think that it's the primary one. For me, I don't really care about bandwidth on my mirror and I'm the first one to say that you can access it as much as you want. I can easily get unlimited bandwidth almost for free and I would be really glad to help SMSpower's cause. I'm not advertising an hosting service (I'm not related in any way to the company I'm linking to, but if you think I'm doing so, feel free to edit/delete this message), but take a look at this: http://hosting.aruba.it/hosting_con_spazio.asp?Lang=EN&offerta=1. 20.66 €/year for unlimited traffic seem a nice offer to me.

I just mean... there are several ways to save some money. Given that contributions and stuff are and will always be a good and needed thing, I think you should consider ways that can easily help you to save some money, since it never hurts. I would be really glad to collaborate in this process. I currently have some free time to waste and I have internet skills (I worked on websites before), so feel free to rely on me. Because I love SMSpower.

Regards.
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Post Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 6:52 pm
Actually we're not so limited on bandwidth.
Part of the site such as the scans sections consume more bandwidth than game shots/ROM. And it's part of our job to have those screenshots up.

No way we're hosting our material on imageshack.us. For one thing those free services may deteriorate picture quality (by saving as JPG), but it also mean we have zero control on the storage and lifetime or data. Imageshack may disappear tomorrow, remove our pictures after some expiration date, or change their policy and stick enormous watermark on all pictures. We don't want to rely on those thing.

We're aware that hosting has become way cheaper than it used to be years ago. Our hosting is relatively pricey (23 times what you quoted, god bless Heliophobe for paying for it), but:
- We're free to use space, extend, create subdomain names, databases. Etc.
- Hoster advertising, "Unlimited space, unlimited traffic". My ass. As soon as just start to eat on their ressources they'll investigate, and what will they find?
We have plenty of copyrighted materials, SMS Power is the most illegal site on the whole planet. It's pretty much tolerated and appreciated by the public since it's old stuff, but any hoster of the kind you mention would kick us the second they notice our activity.
- Server is not running Windows 2003 :P
The legal point is the only 'serious' reason by the way.

However, I'm sure we could find cheaper hosting if we looked for but it'll have to come with hassle-free garantee because we don't want to move every month. This is a decent investigation to do because I always feel guilty Heliophobe's paying those hosting costs (and he is not even abusing of the situation).
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Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 2:01 am
You're right on so many points.
I think I made another pointless topic :(
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Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 8:08 am
A few more things:

- Imageshack does lose images, it's lost several of mine.
- They also "turn off" images using a lot of bandwidth (not that we do, particularly)
- Our host is very cool about our illegality, this relationship is very valuable
- "Unlimited" hosting is never true - rather, it's "fair usage applies" = "whoever uses most bandwidth will be kicked off, until we are profitable enough".
- PNGOUT reduces the image weight of that page to 19391 bytes... (lazy Bock)
- I don't have the exact stats, but I suspect we don't have an infinte number of visitors... more like some hundreds.
- A single person leeching our videos directory will use more bandwidth than everyone else anyway :)
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PNGOUT
Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 9:50 am
Maxim wrote
- PNGOUT reduces the image weight of that page to 19391 bytes... (lazy Bock)

I stopped using PNGOUT a few releases ago because really, it took one hour to compress and freezed my whole computer.
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Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 9:52 am
It's fast on small images, and goes nuts on large ones (more than 1Mpixels, roughly). For these screenshots it takes less than a second each. If I wasn't so lazy I might go and optimise them myself.
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Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 5:15 pm
For screenshots plain-old GIFs or properly optimized PNGs will shrink them the most while keeping them looking nice.

If bandwidth is an issue, you might want to look into blocking direct linking of images (mod-rewrite settings in .htaccess works great, if you're using apache and have mod-rewrite active).

Caching in php might help reduce cpu overhead, too, if that's an issue.
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Post Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 8:18 am
Anti-leech by mod_rewrite is kind of nasty, since it won't work well in some situations (eg. people behind firewalls that strip out referrers from HTTP headers), and gives us a bad reputation whenever people see some "image blocked by smspower.org" message. Plus, we don't have mod_rewrite (yet).

We don't have a heavy PHP load yet, but we are planning on caching when we use it more. phpBB has some kind of caching system built-in.
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