How do I reduce my bandwidth use on my web site?

This is a tricky issue and varies depending on where the main areas of use are and you will need easy access to your logs to find out where the problem is coming from.

Trace the worst abusers

And contact their ISP.

Block external linking

In Apache you can block thing through your .htaccess file.

Banning bad robots from the site

Page caching

As far as anyone can tell the revisit metatag is largely ignored by search engines and they index at will (which, on popular sites) might be once a day which soon mounts up. One of the best solutions seems to be to use the If Modified Since header which tells anything indexing your site that the page hasn't changed since last time and so it can use the old information:

Are you using If Modified Since?

php if-modified-since header

Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters

Cache-Friendly Web Pages

HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers

Consider compressing your pages

Some browsers support page compression. The best approach is to use something like Apache's mod_gzip module:

mod_gzip - serving compressed content by the Apache webserver

PHP allows you to define when compression is used:

PHP function: ob_gzhandler()

Compression can also be turned on across your site through your .htaccess file using:

php_flag zlib.output_compression on

____________________
Emperor

(Added by: Emperor on Mon 03-Nov-2003)

(Edited by: Emperor on Mon 03-Nov-2003)