Working with the Geocities Bandwidth Limit

(Written for webmasters)

Geocities has imposed a monthly data transfer limit. I suspect with all the IT spending cuts, most free sites will adopt these limits shortly. There are ways to live with these limits and still not have you visitors get blocked from seeing your sites. Here's what I have learned-

What is it?

When a visitor is at your site, data is being transferred from the site host to the visitor's PC. In order to move this information, Site hosts and ISP's must pay a fee to the companies that rout the data. If the server is being rented from a larger company, The host also has to pay the larger company for equipment use. These fees are based on how much information is moved. The moving of information requires speed. The more information moved in a given time, the larger the "bandwidth" required to move it. That is why the charges are called "bandwidth" fees.

Free sites face a problem. They only receive income from the pop-up adds they place on your page, but all pages are not created equal. Some are small, and require very little bandwidth, others are huge, and require a lot of bandwidth. One important note: These charges have nothing to do with how much storage space you are using! The charges are only relative to how much data the average visitor will move from your site. Thus, there are ways of having a very deep site without tripping the limits.

What are the limits?

I believe the current Geocities limit is 3.6 Gigabytes a month. There is a catch, it is prorated on an hourly basis! That works out to a little less than 5 meg per hour. Once your 5 meg is used up, people get that dreaded "Page not available" message.

How many visitors does that work out to?

To keep it simple, lets assume people are only hitting you opening, or index page. Add the size of the HTLM code, the background image, any sound files, any graphics on the page, and any Flash or other navigation code (Java Scripts Etc.) together. This gives you the full page size, and is the minimum that will go against your quota when a visitor hits your page. Lets say the total is 150k. That means in any given hour, 33 people could visit before your page is blocked. Simple math tells you that if the page was reduced to 50k, 100 people could visit.

So how do I work around this?

The place to start is your index page. Many people may visit the site by accident while searching for something else. Once they have made the page call, your quota is clocked by the full page content, even if they click away and the code is dumped by the ISP. The trick here is to keep the code as small as possible while keeping the page interesting looking. Here are some rules of thumb to help on this matter.

  • We are taught (but few including myself follow) to keep the visible page size below 640 x 480. The logic here is that the first full page will be visible on every browser and what is not seen does not serve a purpose unless the visitor scrolls. (Many don't) In this day and age, most visitors view at a minimum of at least 800 x 600, so the "soft rule" would be to keep the real interesting stuff in the top 800 x 600 area. At least if you can get their attention, maybe they will scroll. In any case, keep the index page as small as practical so all those who click off haven't used much of your quota.

 

  • Give your graphics a hard look. If you are resizing a picture to make it smaller, you are wasting bandwidth on something nobody will ever be able to see. It would be better to resample the original picture at a smaller size.

 

  • Although Flash and JS are cool, they count against your quota. If you use them, you may also want to consider providing text based links at the bottom of your page so that frequent visitors can get where they want to go without taxing your quota.

 

  • The problems with picture galleries. This, by far, is the largest problem most of us face! I know thumbnails are a pain, but look at the math: Let's say you have 10 high quality photos on a page, each one about 80k. One hit on that page uses up over 800k ! Six or seven hits, and your site is down! Now, the thumbnails: Small, low resolution pictures about an inch square, will use up 3 to 6k. Each thumbnail is then hyperlinked to the high resolution pic. Now your gallery page is only about 50k. (Remember, the whole page size is subtracted from your quota even if the page is not fully loaded.) So, lets say the visitor finds two of the pictures interesting and clicks through. 50 + 80 + 80 = 210k As you can see, four times as many visitors can hit the page before it is over the limit!

 

  • Navigation. The best way to avoid wasted bandwidth is to provide great navigation. By this I mean that your navigation does a good job telling the visitor where they are going. If a visitor clicks on a page that is not interesting to them, you have just wasted their time and they have just wasted your bandwidth. A picture is worth a thousand words. A small sample picture next to the link will only take up 3 to 6k, and will be very helpful to the visitor. Best to waste that bandwidth then loose it to a whole page that was loaded by mistake.

 

  • The pictures themselves. There are a couple of crazy idiosyncracies to compressing graphics. Let's say you find a picture in a magazine that you want to put on your site. You scan the picture and end up with a bitmap file that is 4 or 5 meg. Next you crop the photo and resize it and have a 900k file. You convert it into a Jpeg and it is now 120k. Good enough? NO! Magazine photos have a grain pattern that not only makes the picture look choppy, it also prevents the picture from compressing correctly. After you scan it, but before you resize it, try doing a gentle Gauze blur. The blur will disappear during resizing process and so will the pattern that causes all the problems. When you go to Jpeg it, you will probably find it to be HALF the size!

 

  • Not all Jpegs are the same. Even with pixel and color depth set the same, I find a great variance on the resulting file size when using various programs. Good old "Paint" does a really good job, but try using a few different programs. You will be surprised!

 

  • Don't duplicate someone else's work. If there is another site that has a great gallery, give them a credit link that opens their site up in a new window. This way, they can view the other site without closing out your site. 

Come back often. As I learn more about these bandwidth limits I will be posting it on this page. If you have any suggestions, drop me a line!

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