Bandwidth

"Bandwidth" is the amount of data a website consumes/generates/requires over a given period of time.  Since building Medlogs.com, the bandwidth consumed by my account on our web host has increased quite a bit.  How ironic that a successful weblog or public service site like Medlogs will cost (rather than earn) the owner more money.

Last month (october, 2004) we used nearly 12 GB of bandwidth ... and one morning our sites were down because we had gone over the limit of 10 GB.  So today I'm experimenting with gzip compression to improve the speed of page downloads on both Medlogs and Docnotes.  There are several ways to enable gzip, but the simplest is to use php:

At the beginning of every document (or add it to the MoveableType template) insert this line:

<?php
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
?>

Of course, if it's already a php document, you can omit the <?php ... ?>

This will imporve performance on Medlogs.com and will reduce the amount of bandwidth that we use.

Blogrank.org is coming soon too ;-)