I am trialling the serving of all banner ads, avatars and uploaded images via the Amazon Cloudfront content delivery network, in an effort to cut back on bandwidth costs. The move to a new hosting company (given the circumstances that Silver Stackers was shut down under a few weeks ago) was pretty successful, and the site is now running on a dedicated virtual server with a contract direct with a data centre rather than on shared hosting through a third party. The site is much faster - however the bandwidth is now much more expensive due to the infrastructure being used - the forum hosting costs alone are running into the hundreds of dollars a month. Cheaper hosting could be had offshore, but this would negate many of the site speed improvements due to lag time if we used US based hosting. A content delivery network basically utilises cheap bandwidth from multiple locations (including a point of presence in Sydney - the forum is hosted in Melbourne), and should slash our hosting costs. Be aware that uploaded images will now be cached on the Amazon infrastructure - simply deleting the image through your uploads interface on here won't instantly remove the image from everywhere on the web (which is already somewhat the case with Google indexing the images on the website). If the trial is a success, it will be left in place as a permanent solution. The site should also load even quicker, especially for overseas visitors, once images get cached.
Good job, I've found the site to be much quicker on the new host. I haven't played with Cloudfront before, will be interested to see if anyone complains about it
For those interested, it looks like offloading to Cloudfront is halving the forum's outgoing bandwidth requirements - pretty happy with that.