Bandwidth is the amount of network traffic that flows to and from your website. Unless you offer a lot of upload facilities, most network traffic is generated from your website to visitors. Perhaps you have seen charts like the one below, displaying in- and outbound traffic. The small dark blue line indicates inbound traffic, the rest is outbound.
Everytime a visitor accesses your website, resources like html-files, graphics, javascript-library and stylesheets are downloaded. Fortunately, modern web browsers are clever in the way they store static information locally. As long as the resource on the site is not changed, it will load that resource from the PC and not from the website, thus saving on bandwidth.
We’ve taken this approach a little further to allow dynamic resources, that is resources that change often, to be cached also. By doing this on a location with unmetered internet connectivity and data transfer you can save a lot of money. There are no extra bandwidth usage fees, overage fees or hidden fees.
Below is a screenshot of a portion of the Control Panel that enables you to configure the resource cache.
As you can see, setting up a resource cache is easy. You can enter the URL under which the resource cache is available. This can be a sub-domain of uricache.com or you can choose to enter your own name. Be sure that in case you enter your own name, you need to have the DNS servers pointing this name to the ip-adress of the cache server.
The source url is the original url of your website. The cache timeout is the amount
of seconds that you want the keep resources in the cache. As long as the resource
is cached, visitors of your site will get this resource from the cache and not your
server. Note! You can also choose to cache on disk, allowing you to create a static
copy of your website that will be available even when your website is down.
Once you’ve set up the cache, you change the location of bandwidth consuming resources in your webpages. Do not remove the resources from your site as they will be loaded again once the cache has expired. Here’s a simple example:
| Uncached version | Cached version |
|
<html> <body> … <img src=”mybanner.aspx” /> … </body> </html> |
<html> <body> … <img src=”http://cache.mysite.com/banner.aspx” /> … </body> </html> |
That’s it.
As soon as you set up the cache, you will see a drop in bandwidth usage on your server. Obviously, the amount saved depends on the number of pageviews on your site and the number of resources you’ve redirected. Here are some numbers as an example.
| Number of page views per day | Average page size (KB) | Original bandwidth consumption (GB) | Cache timeout (seconds) | New bandwidth consumption (GB) | % Saved | |
| A | 25,000 | 220 | 5.2 | 20 | 0.3 | 95.0% |
| B | 50,000 | 250 | 11.9 | 40 | 0.3 | 97.5% |
| C | 100,000 | 275 | 26.2 | 120 | 0.2 | 99.2% |
| Nr of file downloads per day | Average download size (MB) | Original bandwidth consumption (GB) | Cache timeout (seconds) | New bandwidth consumption (GB) | % Saved | |
| A | 2,000 | 10 | 19.5 | 120 | 0.2 | 99.2% |
| B | 5,000 | 20 | 97.7 | 30 | 3.3 | 96.7% |
| C | 10,000 | 25 | 244.1 | 240 | 1.0 | 99.6% |
Summary of benefits
- Save 90 percent or more on your bandwidth.
- Increase availability by caching on disk.
- Increase performance by loadbalancing resources.
- Easy to setup, you can benefit within minutes.
- Unmetered transfer.
- No taxes or hidden charges.
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2006/09/14: Bandwidth usage is not an issue any more.