I'd just like to say

I was doing some searchs last night and the stuff still stored on the site is amazing. It goes waaaaay back to when Seanie was in short trousers, Michael had a 300D, DaveL was dreaming of a big Dob and DMcDona was still apologising for being a scouser :lol:(nothing changed there) . A lot of the old image links are dead but the posts make great reading. I can easily see why the bandwidth is close to max.

At the time Kieran, the hosting was on Barts PC and he was close to nervous breakdown because of it, we had his machine going good-o !
Most of the image links are from images that used to be hosted on the site, I was intending going back and fixing all mine with flickr images, but trawling through nearly 6000 posts is going to take me a while :shock: :lol:

I think the single biggest consumers of your bandwidth are images.

Hence repeated requests by some of us Mods/Masters to keep image sizes down (data size, not dimensions, but each is correlated). Especially for observations (moon shots, galaxies, etc), and the astrophotography competition.

Seanie.

I don't know alot about this but I thought that since the images were hosted off site that they do not add to our bandwidth, if this isn't so then why host off site at all ???

You're right Dave, offsite hosting doesn't add to the IFAS forum bandwidth, at least not beyond the extent of the downloading of the link URL which is one line of text. The browser generates an HTTP request directly to the image hosting server in order to retrieve the image and it is that server which bears the bandwidth load.

Yup, Seanie is talkin' crap

Off-site images cost IFAS nothing.

However, we ask people to keep image sizes down because we still have a lot of members on dialup and they don't have the bandwidth to suck down big images at anything faster than glacial speeds!

Bart.