If you notice that you are approaching your limit for bandwidth or storage (as stated in your CMS contract agreement), here are some steps you can take to reduce your usage.
- Remove large files and images. Run the Large Asset report to identify the largest files and images.
- Host your videos outside of CMS. Storage- and bandwidth-intensive videos can be hosted by VMIX, a technology partner that provides a complete suite of tools for managing video and audio content. Blackbaud has arranged special pricing with VMIX.
- Host any large files (like PDFs, PPTs, or DOCs greater than 150 KB) outside of CMS. Large files, especially when they become popular with your constituents, can consume lots of bandwidth (not to mention CMS storage space). Amazon Simple Storage Server (Amazon S3) is a popular storage option that is highly scalable, reliable, fast, secure, and cost-effective.
- Optimize your images for the web. Not only will this reduce your overall storage, but it could reduce your bandwidth utilization. For example, if your website has roughly 500 KB of images on the homepage and has 1000 visitors in a month, then you will consume roughly 0.50 GB of bandwidth. If you were able to optimize those same images to 150 KB on the homepage, the same number of visitors would consume 0.15 GB of bandwidth (that’s roughly 0.35 GB in bandwidth savings, and likely a faster,