RSS is Eating Me Alive (Almost)


Robert Scoble talks about bandwidth costs of RSS and cites it as a reason more and more sites are not giving full text RSS feeds. I was wondering what it cost me, so I looked at my server logs for yesterday. I have about 800 unique IP addresses grabbing my RSS feed each day. That amounted to about 6000 GETs of which roughly 4200 returned a 304 (not modified). So, around 2/3rds of the hits to my feed return 0 bytes. I don't return a full text feed, so its only around 25K. That works out to over 1GB per month of data transfer just from my RSS feed. Having a full text RSS feed could increase that by 3 to 3GB per month. That's pretty substantial given that I'm serving one lonely RSS feed for one insignificant blog. Here's Scoble's math. Sam Ruby weighs in on the proper use of HTTP.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:21 2019.