Too many hits !!??

Francois

I am new to the forum, sort of, although using Smugmug for a year now. So not quite sure where to post this.. please move if inapropriate.

My 'worry' is that over the past few months the number of hits on my modest photo series have doubled just about each month. It started with a few thousand at first, but last month saw 46.000 already.

My question is
a) how much is that compared to 'average' ?
b) should I start to get worried about storage and traffic restrictions?

Any advice is appreciated,

Kind regards,
Francois

Richard

Francois wrote:

I am new to the forum, sort of, although using Smugmug for a year now. So not quite sure where to post this.. please move if inapropriate.

My 'worry' is that over the past few months the number of hits on my modest photo series have doubled just about each month. It started with a few thousand at first, but last month saw 46.000 already.

My question is
a) how much is that compared to 'average' ?
b) should I start to get worried about storage and traffic restrictions?

Any advice is appreciated,

Kind regards,
Francois

Welcome to Dgrin, Francois. You must be doing something right. You don't need to worry about storage restrictions, as there are none. Traffic is another matter.

What to do depends on what you want to get out of your site. If you just want to share pics with your friends and family, you can restrict access to your site by prohibiting external links and making galleries private. Look at the options in Customize Gallery.

If you are interested in becoming a rich and famous photographer, you might consider upgrading your account to get more bandwidth. If you are selling pics, it might pay for itself.

As to what is average, I can't address that. Speaking for myself, I would be delighted if I had your "problem."

Hope this helps.

Francois

rsinmadrid wrote:

Welcome to Dgrin, Francois. You must be doing something right. You don't need to worry about storage restrictions, as there are none. Traffic is another matter.

What to do depends on what you want to get out of your site. If you just want to share pics with your friends and family, you can restrict access to your site by prohibiting external links and making galleries private. Look at the options in Customize Gallery.

If you are interested in becoming a rich and famous photographer, you might consider upgrading your account to get more bandwidth. If you are selling pics, it might pay for itself.

As to what is average, I can't address that. Speaking for myself, I would be delighted if I had your "problem."

Hope this helps.

Many thanks for your reply Richard.
I must have missed the bit about 'no restrictions' . Good to know.

As for becoming a rich photographer... yes.. sounds like a marvellous idea. I'll do my best !

Kind regards,
Francois

Alan M. Carroll

Is it the bots?
I'm having a problem similar to Francois, where the monthly hits just keep increasing (166,000+ last month, joined Jun 04). I actually got turned off last month after using 10G out of my 8G (I've upgraded to Pro, I'll see if 16G is enough). What I wonder is

1. Is this really unusual? Or is this kind of hit rate growth actually common? I've seen other people's galleries and I can't believe that I'm anywhere near the top in quality. Maybe my friends are a particularly on-line crowd? Or is my experience par for the course?
2. Could it be web crawlers, e.g. Google Images? That would explain the steady growth, as it would be a function of the number of pictures.

P.S. There's a feature for you: "You had 166,317 hits this month which ranks you 1634 out of 35,633 customers".

jfriend

Alan M. Carroll wrote:

I'm having a problem similar to Francois, where the monthly hits just keep increasing (166,000+ last month, joined Jun 04). I actually got turned off last month after using 10G out of my 8G (I've upgraded to Pro, I'll see if 16G is enough). What I wonder is

1. Is this really unusual? Or is this kind of hit rate growth actually common? I've seen other people's galleries and I can't believe that I'm anywhere near the top in quality. Maybe my friends are a particularly on-line crowd? Or is my experience par for the course?
2. Could it be web crawlers, e.g. Google Images? That would explain the steady growth, as it would be a function of the number of pictures.

P.S. There's a feature for you: "You had 166,317 hits this month which ranks you 1634 out of 35,633 customers".

I think that it would be safe to say that few people get to that many hits without some direct linking of large images on very busy sites. So, the first question would be whether you have posted direct links to any of your images on busy sites? If you haven't done it, then perhaps someone else has. You could turn off direct linking in your galleries to see if the large number of hits stops going up for a few days.



For reference, for one event, I've posted 12 galleries totalling 1000 photos of the school talent show for the entire school, parents and grand-parents to look at (with originals enabled for download) and only consumed a few GB of bandwidth. Because the web viewing sizes on smgumug aren't very big, it takes an enormous amount of web viewing to add up to multiple GB.

I see that you have statcounter on your site. That won't tell you anything about direct linking, but it will give you good info on viewers of your web-site. You can sometimes figure out where they are coming from and/or if you likely know them (it can often figure out the approx location of your viewers).

--John

Alan M. Carroll

Dueced odd, it is

jfriend wrote:

I think that it would be safe to say that few people get to that many hits without some direct linking of large images on very busy sites. So, the first question would be whether you have posted direct links to any of your images on busy sites? If you haven't done it, then perhaps someone else has. You could turn off direct linking in your galleries to see if the large number of hits stops going up for a few days.

I've posted a few times on DP Review, but I can see those hits broken out in the detailed stats and they're only a small part of the hit / bandwidth count (less than 1G for the month I post). I externally link them in to the posts, I don't put a direct link to Smugmug there. The websites on which I use the images heavily are not big traffic sites (a few hundred page loads / month).

I don't see enormous hits on specific images, but rather across many galleries and many pictures in those galleries. If people are externally linking, they're doing it to quite a lot of different pictures. It's not the case that I have a few "hot" pictures that are driving the traffic.

jfriend wrote:

I see that you have statcounter on your site. That won't tell you anything about direct linking, but it will give you good info on viewers of your web-site. You can sometimes figure out where they are coming from and/or if you likely know them (it can often figure out the approx location of your viewers).
--John

Yes, I just added it on Wednesday and it's already over 1500. So I'm getting a lot of viewing via Smugmug and not just external linking. I don't recognize any of the visitor locations / addresses and I'm quite mystified as to how they find my galleries in the first place. According to the search engines, there is only one external link to the galleries on the entire Internet and it's on one of my websites with tiny traffic.

But that's all mostly off topic. My real question was "how unusual is this?". Apparently, quite, which I find stunning. I figured Franscois was a normal case, as my experience was similar to his and I've been wondering about the traffic growth for months.

I have to confess that it makes me a bit uneasy to be unusual in this way since I'm not trying to be so. I don't want to restrict access because many of my relatives and in-laws aren't very web savvy and I might as well shut it down as put passwords on all the galleries. I was really hoping for a "oh yeah, that happens to everyone" kind of response.

P.S. I think it would be neat for Smugmug to publish averages (mean and median) for hits and bandwidth use over all accounts, although perhaps there are corporate reasons for not doing so.

P. P.S. I still suspect that some of it is web crawlers, because some galleries will have exactly 1 original download on every image for the month. Humans don't do that.

Francois

I have done some more 'research' and think I know where my views are coming from (am over 50.000 already this month). I write 'ride tales', telling of my trips on motor bike, into a very busy BMW Motor Forum, where I include links to my pictures. Every vew of one of those story 'threads' automatically loads in all the pictures linked to it (I think). So if I have 20 picture links in a message, every person opening the message addds 20 views to the Smugmug counter... at tleast that's my theory.

I am not unhappy with it... I WANT people to see my photos, and perhaps make them aware of things I 'sell' : But it did go very fast over the past months and I had no idea indeed about the (lack of) limits, except for the Gb limit (which I am not hitting... 7,5 Gb was the maximum so far).

jfriend

Glad you figured it out

Francois wrote:

I write 'ride tales', telling of my trips on motor bike, into a very busy BMW Motor Forum, where I include links to my pictures. Every vew of one of those story 'threads' automatically loads in all the pictures linked to it (I think).

That sounds like that would explain the usage.

Does anyone know if direct linked images come with referrer links (what page is hosting the image)? If so, it would sure be a nice feature of smugmug to keep some stats on those referrer links so we can tell where the bandwidth usage or hits for direct links are coming from. Maybe only for power user and pro accounts.

--John