My Bandwidth Journey (reducing my bandwidth problem)

[Goggles]

So, my little tiny store with few sales has continuously jumped in bandwidth to the point I am paying $200 a month for my store and facing even more overages. This thread will chronicle some of my efforts to reduce my bandwidth. This thread is in no way meant to bash 3DC. My hope is that 3DC and all of us can learn and understand from this thread. DO NOT THREADCRAP or MAKE BAD REMARKS towards 3DCART in my thread.

We sell eyewear and take great images to sell our eyewear. We must have multiple images. Images are super important to me, more than any other featured offered. This is my third store platform and I have tested many more out there. I was at the point where I had closed one mini plan because it exceeded bandwidth with 5 sales in six months. I was about to close this plan this month and move to a platform that allowed unlimited bandwidth but charged based on sales. I also looked at open source and unlimited hosting.because of bandwidth but instead I embarked on a journey to reduce my bandwidth. Current Plan

High Traffic $199.99/Month

• Unlimited Products
• 60 GB/Month
• 50000 Newsletter Limit

If bandwidth continues to grow the next plan would cost us: High Traffic Plus $499.99 / Month

• Unlimited Products
• 250 GB / Month
• 150000 Newsletter Limit

April 2017 total revenue $4,495.40 $78.1 per GB

Total bandwidth used:

57,568.00

[Goggles]

One of the first things I needed to do was understand how our bandwidth was being used.

This tool Pingdom tells us how our pages are loading and gives us info on how big they are.
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/

We started with the website index page. and looked at the weight of the page and what we could reduce.

So for now run your site thru Pingdom tools and find out how your site loads and what your numbers are.

We started with an index page that took 5 seconds to load and weighed 2mb. Now we are at 422ms load time and 201kB

In the next post I'll explain how we optimized our page.

More to come: More tools and results.
Next tool Smarterstats.

[Goggles]

Note: I do not feel that cloudflare is an option for me and I do not like it. I do feel that 3dcart should be offering it's own CDN (Content Distribution Network) starting on some level of plan.

On my previous store platform I ran a pay as you go CDN and the cost was $0.01/GB A terabyte was $10 and would last for a year. Performance was outstanding.

Note: I'm just a laymen, I'm not involved with IT and don't have any geek super-powers.

If you don't know what a CDN is here is a good explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

[Goggles]

So the next tools you will be needing:
FileZilla FTP https://filezilla-project.org/

Smarterstats: http://apps.3dcart.com/Smarterstats.html
I think it may be included in some plans. ASK 3dcart before doing anything.

I feel it would be in 3dcarts best interest to look into providing smarterstats at a reduced price or free on all plans by default. I really think this would stop some serious customer bleed and you could focus on making better merchants and more successful stores. JMHO.

Our inquiries to support about rising bandwidth usage were very poorly addressed IMHO. Maybe you could improve this script or direct them to some threads that could really help. Even after closing our mini store and declaring the reason in a 3dcart followup survey "nobody got it". Bandwidth charges are killing 3dc customer retention.

Later we will get to why bandwidth explodes for good and bad reasons. A sales per GB meter in the dashboard trailing 90 days would be a great metric/feature.

[JoeBTI]

Goggles 3dCart now offers unlimited bandwidth plans.

https://www.3dcart.com/pricing.htm

[Goggles]

Goggles 3dCart now offers unlimited bandwidth plans.

https://www.3dcart.com/pricing.htm

So why did I have to pay a bandwidth overage fee and have to upgrade in the middle of last month? 15 days ago?

[Goggles]

Also noting the new plan at $79 would take away my

• • Autoresponder Campaigns
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...F7j0gSyydv.png
  • Unlimited
• • Abandoned Cart Saver
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...F7j0gSyydv.png
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...YoG6o8AhYg.png
• • Automation Rules
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...F7j0gSyydv.png
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...YoG6o8AhYg.png
• • Gift Registry
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...F7j0gSyydv.png
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...YoG6o8AhYg.png
• • Product Q & A
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...F7j0gSyydv.png
  • https://www.3dcart.com/2015/images/x...YoG6o8AhYg.png
• • Reward Points

[Goggles]

My store is not showing the new plans, it is also showing that if I want to downgrade there is a $99 charge to downgrade.

[JoeBTI]

You'll need to ask 3dCart. Just wanted to mention to you that they had new plans. Can you purchase those modules from their app store? Will it be cheaper going with the $79 plan plus the buying the add-ons?

$99 downgrade sucks, but if downgrading saves you money, then I guess its worth it if you can get all those add-ons/modules.

[GonzaloGil]

Hi guys, just a heads up that the new plans is something we are testing out right now, they aren't 100% final. Additionally only the latest version supports the new plans so we can't switch plans for existing users just yet, we should have that resolved by end of the month (once everyone is on the latest release), also by that time we should know for sure if the plans are staying, changing, or going back to the previous ones.

[Goggles]

I'll step out here and say that unlimited storage and bandwidth plans are going to end up badly. One of the reasons I didn't move to Bigcommerce or Shopify already. Here is my prediction: performance races to the bottom, customer service becomes overwhelmed and a cut and paste answer takes 24 hours. Real issues take forever to resolve.

One of the issues is that there are so many bad robots, leeches and spiders out there.... I got an image site stealing half my bandwidth from me thru Bing images..... multiply that by thousands of unlimited 3dcart stores and your going to find yourself sitting on a low cost server or forced to upgrade to even higher tiers to get service and performance.

[Goggles]

Thanks for jumping in Gil, I'll send you an eMail and I'll continue my optimization thread and suggestions based on the current plans. I have some tech questions for 3dc bandwidth control options.

[lukiegames]

Unlimited bandwith and a CDN don't help with the biggest problem, if your images aren't optimized or something else is going on that is causing the page to be large it's going to load SLOW - especially for people with slower connections, on mobile, etc. Many will give up. Google will penalize you if it's too overweight, and bing and google might not crawl everything. All our static stuff is on CDNs and that takes the load off of your server and does help with speed some, but a 5mb page on a CDN is going to be slower than a 500kb page on your own server. And of course a 5mb page on a CDN will be slower than a 500kb page on a CDN.

I'm looking forward to hearing about the changes you made.

[thecartdesigner]

Just for reference you can lossless compress your images at tinypng (jgps or pngs) which is free and does wonders for optimization of image file sizes which are typically the brunt of the bandwidth issues.

[ohc]

tinypng looks interesting. It is not lossless however. From their site:
"TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files."