After getting our ISA Server logging to MSDE again (rather than flat files), I was able to get an idea of how much traffic this site and virtualserver.tv are generating and I was quite surprised. Between me and Dugie we’re generating about 6 GB a month which is far more than I thought.
As our hosting is graciously provided for free by the company we work for, we thought that perhaps we should do something about it. Dugie pointed me to this article at the Coding Horror, Reducing our Website’s Bandwidth Usage, which has some useful tips.
Dugie has recently moved his feed over to FeedBurner, which I did a few months back, which will help. I’ve enabled compression on ISA Server which has resulted in a 3.5 time improvement page size and I’ve used PNGOUT to compress the images on my site. I’ve reduced the total size of all pictures from 7 ½ MB to 6 Mb. The next step for me is to investigate hosting images on Flickr or Amazon S3. I’ve also optimised the custom CSS I’m using to squeeze in a little more compression.
So this should reduce our bandwidth consumption and hopefully also improve the speed of the site too. We’re also moving to new hardware soon, so that should result in improved speed as well (we’re completely virtualising our infrastructure – the only Windows server running directly on hardware will be the firewall). 
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