Generating website traffic is one of the best things that can happen to a brand.  People becoming aware of your product/service/art, drinking in your kool aid…. but there can be a downside to all that traffic.  Bandwidth!

There are a lot of ways to lose money these days.  The last thing you want to worry about (when you’re finally seeing the needle move) is bandwidth charges to your site, or worse yet, exceeded bandwidth and your site shut down.  The largest blood sucking ticks to your bandwidth are video, audio, and flash files.

Video is a great feature on any website, it gives the user an experience that simply reading text will never replicate.  However, hosting video on your site is completely unnecessary.  With embedding technology every site has the opportunity to defer some bandwidth.  For instance, if you are interested in showing a video on your site, consider Vimeo or YouTube.   Once you upload the video, you’ll be given the embed code, and it’s (usually) as simple as plugging it into your site. (and if it’s not, you should give us a call)

Several of our clients use audio on their homepage, whether it be to showcase their latest single, or just some mood music while you browse the site.  Having music on your site is great, and it’s not a huge blow to bandwidth, but if it proves to be an issue, a quick fix may be to utilize a music player from a social network.  Not only will this let you maintain control of your playlist, but you won’t have to worry about someone popping out the player and keeping playing all day (and night).

Finally, flash video is a huge consumer of bandwidth, and sadly… there’s no workaround.  Not only does flash incur load times, it’s also not 100% search engine friendly (although this has gotten better recently).  There isn’t much you can’t achieve through JAVA and HTML from a content perspective, and if you’re concerned about chewing up bandwidth, flash is not the direction for you to go.  A strong focus on quality content will out-wow any flash nuance, especially on the second visit to the site.

The overriding factor here, is that if you can add media on your site, there is potentially a way to work around the downsides.  Give them a try before you pay through the nose.