[walrus]

Originally Posted by bluebrit

Ok seems I’m back to this sooner than I thought but the question is slightly different although on topic.

I'll be honest this is all brand new to me so it’s a steep learning curve. If I get any of the terms mixed up here point it out I need to know and thanks for any replies.


Can anyone give me some examples of their bandwidth usage for the rss / blog feeds they run?

I thought rss feeds / blogs, which are pulled mainly from the sponsor (if you used a sponsors feeds) are just a link to their site albeit one that updates more frequently but apparently this may not be the case.

When I had a word with the guys doing my hosting I got this reply when I mentioned I was considering setting up an rss feed, "RSS feeds tend to be fairly resource-intensive and that may be a problem on a shared server" (there was more to the message but nothing that needs to be added here, but I am on a shared server just so you know).

I was under the impression that if you used a sponsors rss feed for example, the bandwidth would be from their end more so than from my server? (ok you’re going to get bandwidth from people going to the site that’s to be expected, but I wouldn't expect more bandwidth from this than a normal html site).

I realize that if necessary a "get function" could basically check if a feed had been updated and if not when aggregators request an update the page would not be reloaded because the feed remained the same, but that too needs some checking. I'm learning now that some aggregators are not too hot and can pull a lot of bandwidth whether a feed is updated or not, hence the initial question.

Oh yes one last thing, I may in the future add a blog of my own to this site which will pull more bandwidth but again that’s to be expected, but how often do you update your blogs on average to make them worthwhile? 2-3 times per week or less? again I’m curious about the server usage and the bandwidth this uses.

regards to all
bluebrit

I've got a number of blogs running on shared hosting that are RSS fed without any problems. Last month with a little over 28k of uniques and 148k of pages, I used a little over of 10gig in bandwidth. Thats a blog thats probably updated a minimum of 2 times a day from the feeds.

If your not doing any type of caching of the feeds or pulling the feeds in and adding them to a database, I would guess the cpu load might get a bit excessive as you would be pulling all the data from your sponsor every time someone visited your site. But the way most readers work is they pull the complete feed once and then check for updates and only update if a new post is found. My sites check for updates every hour.

I feel that a blog, whether feeds or hand written needs to be updated a minimum of 4 times a week