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Ask HN: My site is getting popular, bandwidth expensive

14 points by ElbertF ↗ HN
I'm running a (small) image hosting site which has been getting a little bit of traction lately (2,000 to 5,000 visitors a day, spikes up to 10,000). It's hosted on Linode and I've already run out of the bandwidth for this month (300 GB). I've experimented with Amazon S3 but that was costing me $5 a day, Linode currently costs me $30 a month. I get a tiny bit of revenue from ads (Adsense and Black Label Ads) but it's not enough to break even.

What should I do? Obviously I'd like to keep running the site but not if it starts costing me a lot of money.

18 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] thread
Skywing
Gotta spend some to make some. The worst thing to do right now would be to kill off all the traction you have because you're not willing to pay $30/mo (which is nothing). Give yourself time to come up with revenue models and stuff. Three months is only $90, but its also a lot of time to find out how to make some money off of your site.

Just my thoughts.

Smerity
I presume your website is http://reversegif.com/ ? Cute =]

The issue you're going to find is that bandwidth doesn't get much cheaper than Amazon S3 unless you start going with hosting providers who are questionable. At $5/day with Amazon can we assume you're transferring around 30GB/day?

At this point a decidated hosting provider may be a better fit. For $40 a month you can get a dedicated box with Hetzner[1] that will allow you 2TB/month @ 100Mbit which then gets shaped to unlimited @ 10Mbit. 2000GB/31 days is basically 65 GB per day - more bandwidth than you need for the moment and at a cheaper rate than S3 can provide (2TB at Amazon S3 rates ($0.15/GB) is $300). If you can survive with lag from Germany this would be optimal.

The other (far nicer) option is to try and find a strategic partner. Someone like ICanHasCheezburger / FailBlog makes enough money from eyeballs that it may be worth their time to either provide you with money or bandwidth in exchange for a major link back to their page. Reach out to them, show them your page stats and see what sort of response you can get. They're already in a far more lucrative position as far as ad partners are concerned and can likely use your traffic to move into an even better bargaining position. They likely also have huge amounts of bandwidth spare as well which they may be more than happy to offer to you.

As another commenter said, $5/day won't kill you and I think you have quite a reasonable chance of making this back. Congrats on your success so far - if you ever come down to Sydney come along to SiliconBeach - I'd be interested to chat =]

[1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2

psyklic
I second that the site is cute =) If that is your site though, you may want to disable debugging -- it is exposing your SQL queries. (See the end of the HTML file.)
ElbertF
Yikes, I didn't mean to leave that on. Thanks for the heads-up.
ElbertF
Yes that's the site. I was actually surprised to find out it was cheaper to spend an extra 10 bucks on Linode than to offload the images to S3 although that might change if the site gets bigger. I actually contacted Ben Huh from the Cheezburger network a few months ago, he seemed interested but somewhat unimpressed with the numbers I had then.

I won't kill off the site just yet, I'm prepared to lose a bit of money on it while I'm trying to figure out a solution. Thanks for the suggestions!

metachris
+1 for hetzner, a great hosting company with good prices and a solid service. I have been using them for years and never had a problem.
hayley
Though I'd assume that most of your bandwidth is getting eaten up by the images, you might consider any/all of the following:

* minify HTML output

* minify your CSS files

* use the Google hosted version of jquery http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/

calebhicks
Posting it to Hackernews may not help your bandwidth situation :).

With thousands of visits, it's worth looking at your HTML/CSS and simplifying it to minimize the bandwidth needed. May seems small in comparison to the image bandwidth, but it won't hurt.

ElbertF
So far HN accounts for 0.3% of the hits today. :)
sagacity
> ...it's worth looking at your HTML/CSS and simplifying it to minimize the bandwidth needed.

Very sound advice. Doing this has produced amazing results for us more than once in the past. As an added advantage, it'll speed things up a bit too! :-)

minalecs
how did you get initial traction to the site ?
ElbertF
By posting a couple of links on Reddit. :)
dmc
One thing I quickly noticed, is that your advert is hard to click on particular adverts[1](in Chromium on Fedora, at any rate). I cannot click the advert below the top of the image, to the left or right. In some places this can cover half the advert.

[1] http://reversegif.com/9z7

ElbertF
Valid point, I'll lower the main image a bit and figure how to keep at least the sides of the ad clickable if it's still covered.
sagacity
You know what? Since the time I looked at your site (~ 2 hours ago) it has been kind of growing on me.

Although I'm kind of reluctant to admit this, I messaged the URL to a whole lot of my contacts. :-)

The more I think about it, the more I feel it one of those typical things that have the potential to go really viral; something like the hampsterdance.com of 1999/2000.

My suggestion is to start promoting it every which way you can and building some kind of community around this asap. (In all probability, you won't have to actively do any of these for long.)

All the best.

latch
You probably wanna look at http://www.slowcop.com/ (which was at the front of HN today), which largely suggests what others have said so far...link to jquery on google, fix missing Cache-Control: Public headers, gzip/minify/merge css/js...add far reaching expiry headers...

0.10 to 0.15$ per GB is pretty standard low-end for low bandwidth sites. Prices only really drop once you cross the 50-100TB/m range.

Your problem is that you're hosting cost (linode) is something you need to pay regardless, so you want to use that "free" bandwidth. I've seen people swap domains. Have images1.mysite.com which points to their main servers...and then when they get near their limit they switch to images2.mysite.com which would point to a place with cheaper bandwidth. Problem is, linode prices are pretty damn reasonable (probably cheaper than S3 when you add storage/GETs/etc).

If you prepay at linode it's $0.10/gb...you should just buy a Linode 512 at that point, since it's the $20/200gb ($0.10/gb again) + you get the extra machine.

100tb.com, a softlayer reseller, is a known large-bandwidth [over]seller. They have VPs for ~$100/month with 10TB included..there may be other options, but I probably wouldn't recommend this route.

I hope you are making backups of your images...

[dead] pinksoda
I used to run an image hosting site that ranked about 15,000 on Alexa. I also had a file hosting site ranking right around there. Not quite Imgur or Megaupload, but I wouldn't want to be anyways.

It cost several thousand dollars per month for bandwidth and was extremely hard to monetize. Removing illegal content was a pain and taking care of the DMCA notices was a pain (probably even worse now with tools like www.tineye.com).

I was in your position, except a little further down the road, and I decided it didn't make sense to keep it running. Maybe if I hung in there it could have been successful, but bandwidth usage was increasing exponentially.

A lot of "unlimited" bandwidth hosts don't like image/file hosts because they are known to use their full allotment. Be prepared to pay $2,000+ per 20TB. Amazon S3 does 14 cents per GB, but if you give SoftLayer a call they can probably hook you up with 10 cents per GB.