How do you determine how much bandwidth you need for a website.

[AAP]

Here are specs. (I am guessing)

50000 visitors each month.

Nothing to download (maybe right click some photos and save them)

No forums.

99% photographs on the website. Estimating to add about 60-100 photographs per week. Pruning photographs at minimum 3 months / maximum 6 months.

Was thinking of using Pair.com unless someone suggests otherwise.

I don't see the need having to use MYSQL or email capabilities or shit like that.

 

[digger]

Dooooooooooood. What is with people signing up their hosting and all that BEFORE they get their developer on board? Makes me crazy when Craigslist peeps do that.

It's like going to the deli with your own loaf of bread and a live cow and saying "Here, make me a sammitch out of these. I expect a big discount."

 

[needtogetarmy]

It would depend on the size of the pictures.

Say a photograph is 100kb and pay 100 per week are viewed by 50,000 people so, assuming 50,000 people look at each picture every week:

100kb * 100 * 50,000 = 500,000,000kb

There are 1,048,576kb in a GB (http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/)

Thus, dividing 500,000,000kb by 1,048,576 = 476.83 GB.

That is roughly how much bandwidth you would need.

 

[needtogetarmy]

FYI: stay away from http://www.ait.com/ to host your site.

They suck royal ass. I used to hose my own ... website and those cocksuckers can't host properly.

 

[Razorguns]

m6.net

 

[AAP]

ok, the pictures will be thumbnail size. When you mouse over the picture it will pop up a box ("floating") that displays the picture bigger and when the mouse is moved off the picture, the pop up goes away.

All the content is ready and only needs to be uploaded to the website. Of course new content is going to be added each week as it becomes available. But then again, old content is going to be pruned as well. Perhaps at the 3 month mark.

Does the number of visitors who visit the site affect the bandwidth?

And supposing I exceed this bandwidth... I will need a hosting site that allows for an expansion plan.

 

[AAP]

m6.net

They have a package that has 250 gig storage and 1500 gig transfer. 40 website and 800 FTP logins.

I understand the 250 gig storage deal, but what does the 1500 gig transfer refer to? I assume I can host up to 40 different websites on this box (or what?) and why do I need 800 FTP logins? Or is that refering to 800 logins for the same FTP each month? (as opposed to 800 different kind of logins)

The website is not going to have a Search feature or anything. If advertisers want to have a banner there with it being a gateway to their website, it is possible. (their website would open in new window if clicked)

 

[digger]

The "transfer" is how many bytes you send to anybody, total, accumulated over the whole month. Your ISP will be licking their lips as you get to the end of the month, anticipating you going over your allotment, which will allow them to make payments on their Porsches. I exaggerate only slightly.

Telling you "you may move 100GB a month" is a rotten way to express bandwidth -- it gives you no real idea of how fast you can deliver it.

I used to have 100GB/month alloted for my personal site; by the 28th of the month after seeing it below 2GB, I'd go fire up BitTorrent and swap some (legal, fan-made) movies for two days. It turned out that my site could "burst" up to a megabit per second, which isn't bad for a hobbyist. If I kept it up for very long, though, I'd be so far over my alloted transfer that they would own me.

These days I have a "Committed Information Rate" which is measured not in total transfer but in bits per second. (1 mbit/sec CIR = 340GB, approximately.) 1.5 terabytes per month sounds pretty sweet.

Of COURSE the number of visitors has a bearing on how much data you transfer. Every time someone mouses over a thumbnail, the number of bytes it takes for you to send them the big picture gets added to your "transfer."

Now, as for your design... Sending the larger picture on a mouse-over instead of a click sounds stupid to me. Is that some kind of AJAX baloney? If you push the big pictures in the background, it's going to mean wasting much of your bandwidth, and if you DON'T push them in the background, your page will be an utter dog.

 

[AAP]

^^

So you say instead of doing the mouseover/popup float combo, you would just perhaps make the thumbnail activate only by a click and then a larger box would pop open?

Or would it be more feasible to just make the thumbnail larger into a regular picture, say something like 1.5"x1.5" (just estimating) and leaving it like that with no option to click and enlarge?

I would imagine only putting a couple images on the page under each date and linking that to a Simpleviewer gallery would be out of the question. Since Simpleviewer has the thumbnails/enlargen combo there.

 

[digger]

The interweb is fulla pictures. What's going to make 50K bros and broettes want to come look at your lolcats?

There's lots and lots of gallery packages; haven't looked at Simpleviewer, but Gallery (see Sourceforge) does a decent job of boiling images down to thumbnail size, and letting peeps see the full-size if they're interested enough; no need to compromise on that. Gallery also offers the option to send a pic off and have it printed, which is kind of cool for some uses. They get a cut of the action, everybody's happy. Gallery 2 assumes you have MySQL to handle the storage, while Gallery 1 is just flat files.

Setting up MySQL is not that big a deal, frankly. Sounds to me like you may be trying to simplify it to the point it won't work so good.

 

[perkele]

Here are specs. (I am guessing)

50000 visitors each month.

Nothing to download (maybe right click some photos and save them)

No forums.

99% photographs on the website. Estimating to add about 60-100 photographs per week. Pruning photographs at minimum 3 months / maximum 6 months.

Was thinking of using Pair.com unless someone suggests otherwise.

I don't see the need having to use MYSQL or email capabilities or shit like that.

What you're planning broham?

 

[AAP]

What you're planning broham?

I don't know what is lamer. The fact you stole my sig and saved in on your harddrive or the fact that you even have a link to that website.

Queer!

 

[AAP]

The interweb is fulla pictures. What's going to make 50K bros and broettes want to come look at your lolcats?

There's lots and lots of gallery packages; haven't looked at Simpleviewer, but Gallery (see Sourceforge) does a decent job of boiling images down to thumbnail size, and letting peeps see the full-size if they're interested enough; no need to compromise on that. Gallery also offers the option to send a pic off and have it printed, which is kind of cool for some uses. They get a cut of the action, everybody's happy. Gallery 2 assumes you have MySQL to handle the storage, while Gallery 1 is just flat files.

Setting up MySQL is not that big a deal, frankly. Sounds to me like you may be trying to simplify it to the point it won't work so good.

The people will come. Trust me on that. There are 18 sponsors already committed to placing their banner and gateway ad on the site as well.

it is all photos. no text content or anything. (at least not in the reading/articles/journalism kind of sense.)

I take it Sourceforge is able to be customized and integrated seamlessly in the design?

 

[excugat]

"it is all photos. no text content or anything. (at least not in the reading/articles/journalism kind of sense.)"

You might need to fluff up some relevant text on most pages, to help with your SEO.
(search engine optimization) Runnining on referral or page title, image alt. text etc, alone is not good.

 

[AAP]

"it is all photos. no text content or anything. (at least not in the reading/articles/journalism kind of sense.)"

You might need to fluff up some relevant text on most pages, to help with your SEO.
(search engine optimization) Runnining on referral or page title, image alt. text etc, alone is not good.

It is going to be run in affiliation with a national magazine. The only people that would mainly be interested in the website are the exact people that read this magazine. (Since it would be mostly pictures of them and events held by the sponsors.)

I don't really think any random internet crawler would find anything interesting about the site if they stumbled on it. Remember there is nothing for sale here. Nothing to buy.

 

[digger]

I take it Sourceforge is able to be customized and integrated seamlessly in the design?

Sourceforge is a site that hosts a gazillion Open Source projects.

Answer to your question is "yes." Gallery (1 or 2) comes with a lot of different skins, and if you can't find one that's suitable you also have the source for the whole thing, so you can build a site and just use the working bits from Gallery to drive your own look.

Turning a real developer loose on the problem will save you a ton of heartache about six months down the road. Trust me on that one.

 

[AAP]

Sourceforge is a site that hosts a gazillion Open Source projects.

Answer to your question is "yes." Gallery (1 or 2) comes with a lot of different skins, and if you can't find one that's suitable you also have the source for the whole thing, so you can build a site and just use the working bits from Gallery to drive your own look.

Turning a real developer loose on the problem will save you a ton of heartache about six months down the road. Trust me on that one.

I am not finding any examples of Gallery 1 or 2 demos or such. There is one one screenshot on the download page, but no examples of galleries users have created with the product.

I just woke up too so am sleepy.

 

[digger]

Follow the links to menalto.com -- they have examples out the proverbial.

 

[AAP]

Is there any disadvantage to using Photoshop CS3 to create the webgallery? It gives you thumbnails on the left side and an enlargened image of which ever one you click on the right side.

basically you put all the images in a folder (source) run the automated process and direct the index.htm page to another file.

Like this :

However I suppose I can open up the source code in Dreamweaver and change the background color to black and remove the Adobe statement at the top.

 

[binö]

lotsa computer nerdery in this thread

 

[excugat]

It is going to be run in affiliation with a national magazine. The only people that would mainly be interested in the website are the exact people that read this magazine. (Since it would be mostly pictures of them and events held by the sponsors.)

I don't really think any random internet crawler would find anything interesting about the site if they stumbled on it. Remember there is nothing for sale here. Nothing to buy.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
will give you some idea of national daily keyword/phrase traffic.
But like you say, even if you generalize the keywords a bit, there is probably not much google/yahoo traffic.

 

[needtogetarmy]

Turning a real developer loose on the problem will save you a ton of heartache about six months down the road. Trust me on that one.

I agree totally with this. Pay out the money and get a professional developer on it and you'll be up in running in a fraction of time with fewer worries.

The money you think you are saving will end up being eaten up by your time, and then some.