The problem of slashdotting or high bandwidth charges stems from an exclusivity of content. Put another way, Vegan.com wouldn't cost you as much to host if more than one person hosted it.
Hmm, where have I heard of that concept before? Ahh, yes, mirrors. Back in the day of static content,it was an easy thing - just a wget in a cron job.
So, how can we apply the old concept of mirroring in an effective way with todays websites.
What to do:
Streamline the pages. I'd guess that people who value your content will still value it with less eye-candy. Think Google. Hopefully, some of the worst leeches will be so put off with the lack of shiny things, they'll wander off and not come back...
Offload as much static content as possible, like images. Use your free ISP space, or a buddies dsl, or sign up for a few "free-web-space" sites and dump your images there. You could even round-robin your img tag generation to spread the load. Much of what is seen as "dynamic" can effectively become static if you could automatically update the mirrors once a day.
Mirror the site. Harder with db driven stuff, cause you need the same setup. Doesn't work so good for discussion sites. Maybe you could mirror the static pages and host the dynamic ones yourself.
Increase the content per server call. Example: Say you have some series of forms or pages the user goes thru to do something. If you can reduce the number of forms while asking the same questions, that's fewer server calls.
Analyze your logs. If there are 3 pages that 75% of the users hit, could you combine those three to give everyone the same content but with a single server call? Imagine your front page is 10k and of that 2k is content, the rest is css, gifs, etc, etc. If most people are also hitting a second page to get to another 2k of content, you've got to build and send the second 10k page. Instead, send them a single 12k page.
I assume you're compressing your output?
Intelligent use of popups? If someone clicks on a link in your page, and then hits the back button fine. If they hit your home page link you've helpfully provided on each page, they could be reloading your home page. Imagine as they hit 15 links thru your site...15 reloads! If you popped up the info in the link, they could close the popup and be back to the main page without the chance of reloading the same page.
Maybe what we need is a way to cluster and load balance a website, but in a geographically distributed, p2pish way. Make it configurable so I could agree to handle so many hits/day or every 10'th request, something like that....
Slashdot Mirror
The problem of slashdotting or high bandwidth charges stems from an exclusivity of content. Put another way, Vegan.com wouldn't cost you as much to host if more than one person hosted it.
Hmm, where have I heard of that concept before? Ahh, yes, mirrors. Back in the day of static content,it was an easy thing - just a wget in a cron job.
So, how can we apply the old concept of mirroring in an effective way with todays websites.
Maybe what we need is a way to cluster and load balance a website, but in a geographically distributed, p2pish way. Make it configurable so I could agree to handle so many hits/day or every 10'th request, something like that....