Jeff Atwood of Vertigo blogged about Reducing Your Website’s Bandwidth Usage. He had a look at a popular post that used almost 9Gb in one day, and analysed how he could have reduced his site’s bandwidth usage.

From my own personal experience, putting not just the image files, but all media files on a cheaper transit is certainly the best way to save bandwidth cost.

It especially applies to those of us who also host web sites outside the United States for SEO reasons. Australian bandwidth is expensive, and it is common to have shared hosting plans that come with less than 5Gb/month data transfer, which will not be enough with even 500 uniques a day when you have a few images on your site.

Moving media files to US bandwidth solves this issue for me. It is way cheaper, and sometimes more reliable. At the same time the main site is still sitting on an Australian IP address, which gives your site priority on localised search engines (I shall talk more about that in the future).

Now, which external provider should I choose? I shall try to rationalise it into a few points.

1. It has to be cheaper than my current provider. Obvious, isn’t it?

2. It needs to scale up and down. Will the same solution survive if it is pulling 90Gb per day? Or 900Gb per day? Will you over-pay if your visitors are only downloading 900Mb today?

3. Acceptable terms and conditions. A few providers will not let you upload anything other than images. Some will have maximum file size. Do read the T&C before signing up.

4. Ease of management. How easy is it to upload? How easy is it to take down a file? How easy is it to synchronise against a local folder? FTP, WebDAV or rsync? These become important when you have many files to store on that external provider.

5. Rebrandability can be important. Do you your visitors see that all image files are stored on a 3^rd party website? Can you provide your own host name?

Point 4 & 5 pretty much eliminates the likes of Imageshack, Flickr and Photobucket as external media file serving provider. Many shared hosting won’t fair too well in point 2 & 3, although large shared hosts might actually let you use terabytes of data transfer allocated to you each month (like DreamHost). At the same time, traditional CDN like Akamai aren’t really good at pricing. Moreover, you do not like to go through tedious sale process, do you? (Just give me a price, damn it!)

That does not leave us many choices, does it? These are the few that I had looked at:

• Amazon S3 — S3 is definitely my pick at the moment. It is supposed to be scalable. Pay as you go at $0.20/Gb transferred is cheap. There are mountain-full of 3^rd party apps. You can re-brand easily with a CNAME DNS entry. Although my experience with downloading content from S3 from Australia isn’t that great.

  Another advantage of Amazon S3 is its support of BitTorrent protocol. You can have your users contributing to your bandwidth pool and save money. Why not?

• BingoDisk — Joyent has just dropped the subscription fee of BingoDisk to $19/year for 10Gb storage and unlimited data transfer! It is on WebDAV so it is very easy to manage. CNAME-based virtual host is also supported. However, all your files are stored on a beefy Sun server, so no data centre level redundancy like Amazon S3. “Unlimited bandwidth (just don’t abuse us)” — so exactly how many gigabytes per month?

• Cachefly — they give you a FTP account, and will push your files across all its data centres across the world. Sophisticated anycast protocol is used to determine closest data centre. There is a per-month fixed cost, but not too bad either. Not sure whether virtual host is supported.

For most people however, I believe an oversold shared hosting account will suffice. Fortunately (or unfortunately) all my sites together push out only around 25Gb/month, including images! I guess I do not have to touch anything I have just talked about for a while…