my site gets too many hits
 

Hi

I need some serious advice here, my site currently gets close to half a million hits a month and rising and because of this my bandwidth is getting sucked up extremely fast!! I'm paying through the nose to stay on the air :(

now I don't like adverts because they do ruin the appearance of the site (particularly google adwords)

but...

I need to some how balance out what it costs to keep my site up and at the same time not overwhelm my thousands of readers with annoying adverts that they aren't interested in.

Any advice?

Hi,

well you could send a few of your visitors my way.....

I don't understand what you mean about adwords.... do you mean adsense?

Adsense's quite good at providing relevant adverts if you set the page up right, and by using appropriate formatting you can blend them in very nicely.

Cheers,
Paz.

yup adsense is what I meant, sorry

just the idea of that long colum down the side of my site of random ads makes me shudder

does it really pay though? who actually makes an income off it?

I basically just wana cover an extra $30 a month to cover my bandwidth problems since everyone is milking my 65 gig bandwidth quota dry :eyes:

is it realistic to think I could make that with adsense?

There are people who claim to make a fortune from adsense - many just make enough to pay for their hosting.

Check out this link to see what sort of ad Google would up on your pages. There are a range of styles,sizes to choose from:

http://adsense.toolbot.com/

Cheers,
Paz.

Just some suggestions off the top of my head: I've seen some sites set up with PayPal Donations to help pay for bandwidth; don't know if this works well. Also, perhaps you could start charging people for downloads? (I'm assuming you don't and assuming that everything in your Download section is right from your server -- I didn't want to start clicking around too much! LOL! Nice site, btw!)

Could some of your graphics be too large? Maybe look into that. But I have the feeling you don't want to mess with how your site looks.

One thing I had read about but don't know too much about is compression. If I understand it correctly, you have your static pages gzipped, your server serves that to the browser, the browser unpacks it, so to speak, and delivers it to the user. Same idea as sending a zipped attachment via e-mail -- a smaller package is delivered... Just did a quick search and found this (HTML compression is what I'm talking about):

http://webreference.com/internet/so...tp/compression/

I use FastClick for my ads; you have a lot of control over which ads you want presented (which is good because I'm not impressed with SOME of their ads).

Hope this helps -- and yeah, you could just send some of that traffic my way, too!

Suzanne

Well, one thing you could do is clean up your code & images a bit to reduce the bandwidth used.

Too many hits........ I hate that problem. hehe You can always sell the site to us. :D

You could certainly make a lot off of ads with that kind of traffic, I have sites in adsense that produce thousands of dollars per month, with less traffic. Once your site is viewable again I will check it out and give you some advice
Cheers

ok just an update on the site
I've upped the bandwidth limit to 75 gigs a month and
I've introduced a small adsense banner to the side menu of my site

how do I choose to have payments based on "impressions" rather then "clicks"
Google adsense is recording over 20,000 impressions a day for my site, I'd love to be paid per 1000 as the adsense site suggests, that would be close to $20 US a day

I've emailed them, but they aren't too keen on the replies

I just checked out your site. Very Nice site btw. Just so you know, Google doesn't allow you to talk about the specifics about how much you and other related info. I'll find that page in a little bit.

I'm sure you won't have any problem covering the bandwidth costs with many that many visitors.

Jose