I found tips on the net on how to save bandwidth or how to prevent going over the bandwidth limit. And it kinda explains a lot why this and why that.

First, what is bandwidth?

Bandwidth, on the other hand, refers to the number of times files are downloaded from your site in a month. This number is reset every month. 

If you have 10 images in your gallery, and each image is 1 Mb in size, when a visitor views your gallery, they use 10 Mb of bandwidth to view those 10 images. 

If you have 10 visitors to that gallery, they will use 100 Mb to view those images. 

If you have 100 visitors to the gallery, they use 1,000 Mb, or approximately 1 Gb to view those images. 

source

Uh-oh. According to this, the amount of daily pageviews to the site is 201,714 and 33, 619 unique visitors everyday. I don't understand most of the data in that page but below you will find a graph on pageviews and pageviews/user. So we've got high traffic alright. And it... causes problems to the site.

...too many visitors on your website can cause it to go offline.

source

So, what are we supposed to do? O.O 

1. Use hosting sites for files -  check

2. Resize images - affhelpers have done this; check

Reducing file size, reduces the bandwidth used for them

source

3. Use JPG and PNG - check

4. Try avoiding use of images, use HTML and CSS instead. [ex. use color code for black instead of black.jpg] - check

5. Use HTML and CSS. And then compress them -  yes, boss would have done this, check

6. Use DIV and SPAN, no TABLE - check

7. Don't use HTML comments - check; this is the reason why we can't paste codes in comment boxes [but in 2010, we comment with marquees, haha]

8. Disable hotlinks - check

9. Remove music - check

10. Make your site MEMBERS ONLY - uh oh

11. Don't submit website to search engine. 

Searchbots from searchengines such as Google act just like a returning visitor: They crawl your website, causing it for you to lose bandwidth. Do not add your URL to an searchengine. If you want your website to be found, but don't want to waste your bandwidth on the bot, there are several webmaster tools that will slow down the crawling speed of the bots.

12. Don't spread the word - o.O ; impossible

I think 10-12 cannot be applied to AFF. 

13. Get a new host - we need money

sources 1 2

At least we know... a bit why boss had to do what he had to dom and what causes problems in our site.

I do not claim to be an expert but let me just use this space to spill my thoughts. Webspace is different from Bandwidth. But reducing the sizes of the files in the webspace, reduces bandwidth.

Reducing file size, reduces the bandwidth used for them

source

So... we delete some old, never to be updated stories, dead discussions, blog posts [like this one] and then some... at the layout marketplace? 

Imma get mobbed for this... but do we... request RPers to move to RolePlay Republic, with their threads, blogs, multiple user accounts, etc. to create traffic there and reduce our file size? lol. I heard there's not much going on in that site. And RPing is the main purpose of RPR.

I believe we can do something to help out. We just need to know what.

For now, how about subscribing to AFFHelper's blogs if not adding them as friend to be updated  about the site to avoid... negative feels? 

- Keeper