[thelist] web hosting, how to reduce bandwidth usage??

[Tom Lyczko]

Hello, this is my first post to the list...

My tip is at the end of this email, the only thing I could think of quickly
that possibly not *everyone* has thought of yet...

I've been doing website design for some years now, and I've typically
handled these sites' hosting via different hosting providers.

I have a number of domains and sites that I regularly maintain.

I'm trying to learn more about what I can do to reduce costs for one site,
www.eroticmaleart.com, an online art gallery/store (NOT pornography) that is
up to about 13-15 gig/month of bandwidth, sigh...

So I have a few questions:

1. Are there any companies/services wherein I can host the site's *.jpg
images only (which account for about 80% of the bandwidth), to be referenced
by the main site?? This would be permanent image hosting, not the
commonly/easily found auction image hosting services.

2. If I were to inquire with my hosting company (or elsewhere) about
purchasing reseller services, would I be considered doing something against
someone's terms of service by hosting 3 or 4 domains/sites that *I*
own/maintain on a reseller account?? Or is this simply not done?? I was
thinking that if I could get a reseller account with, say, 40 gigs
bandwidth, that would be plenty for the 3-4 sites that I would host on the
reseller acccount...(EMA, the big site, uses classic ASP, for its display
and cart).

I've thought of the dedicated server route, but even there one has bandwidth
limits, and IIS isn't all that easy to set up for multiple domain serving
(host headers and DNS'ing have to be set up). I don't yet know Apache,
sorry, though there's lots of books out there, I can pick it up quickly.

I don't think it would be practical for me to get a business cable Internet
account through Charter Cable (my only broadband option), and host the
images, because then the upload speed of the connection would be a limiting
factor on others' downloads of the images, and I don't think Charter would
let me serve that much bandwidth per month...

I have found the list submission regarding website hosting resources, but I
thought I would try here as well. Off-list responses are fine, and I will
check my digests daily.

Thank you!!!

:) tom

<tip>Make a text-based submit link look like a submit button by putting a
border around the text with CSS. It calls attention to the text, as
well.</tip>