Save Your Website Bandwidth
If you are running a blog on your own servers, why not save a little bit of your bandwidth by off loading them to third party image hosting websites.
Bennyong.com uses Flickr.com for all personal pictures and ImageShack.us for any other images. (eg. Website Logos & Screenshoots). The reason behind this is to reap the benefits of using a web based image organizing tool that can centralize all your collection for easy viewing and house keeping.
For example, the gallery in this blog syndicates the contents from Flickr.com which is powered by Yahoo!. This means that I can benefit from using a common platform to centralize all my personal pictures for sharing and I can access it anywhere for free. (Unless I upgrade for a premium package which by the looks of it, ain’t gonna happen anytime soon)
And since I did not want to disrupt my personal photos with any other pictures, I decided to use ImageShack.us for any other images that I need to post. If I were to host the images myself, I will need a FTP application or use my online file manager from my web hosting company to do this each time.
The Cons
Since the website is managed by a third party company, you never know when they may go bust and instantly all the images on your sites will no longer exists and appear invalid. Also, all free image hosting sites that I know require you to link back to them in exchange of using their free hosting service.
If you are ready to explore this path, there are load of other image hosting websites out there such the following to name a few:
Thinking out loud, if you were to have a blog on Blogger.com, everything will be sorted out for you to make your post. However, I am not sure whether they provide centralize access to the collection of images that you have posted all together.
Well, let me know what you think?
Cheers!
Filed under: Technology
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I found your blog via John Chow’s. Just want to say you have an interesting one and I’ll try to revisit every so often.
In any case, this tip of yours is a good one. I do see another con, though more so from my personal angle. My website, http://ww2db.com , has a load of pictures, and they are being displayed from a database table that indexes them. Is there an easy way to do integrate the two? Maybe, but serving on your own host means you can get around that very easily.
Also, depending on the size of your images and your traffic, some web hosts do allow plenty of bandwidth. For example, my host is Dreamhost ( http://www.dreamhost.com/ ), and it provides me tons of bandwidth and it also grows monthly. Currently, I have something like 5 or 10 terabytes. I think that’s enough for most personal sites, huh?
Once again, well done on your blog!
Greetings Pete, Thanks for your comment and I agree that by having it on your own host allows you the flexibility of controlling all those images. Relatively, disk space is becoming cheaper by the day. Thanks and I enjoy your continued support.
Hehe, I like how you removed my referral code from the Dreamhost link
So that was what it was… I thought I was tidying up the link. Funny that they are still relying on CGI for the referral script
No problem. If you want, you can add it back and help me make some referrals to pay for my hosting
The link is http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?61672
Oh, I suppose you can delete these follow-up comments if you want to clean up our conversation on your blog.
Thanks! And once again good job with the blog. The feed has been added to my iGoogle.