I have a webpage at www.sawyercreek.com for my appaloosa horse farm.  We have a webcam where you can watch the horses being born.  The problem is the webhosting service (my local internet provider) is threatning to cut me off as they are transmitting over 5 gigs a day in images (I can't control how popular the site is).  Is there any free webcam image hosting sites out there (I don't make money off of the site) or atleast someplace that won't charge me the $500 a month my local provider wants to charge me.

First let me say that DVDtracker is absolutely correct. (So the status quo probably isn't going to work)

But there are some things you could do yourself to drastically cut down on your bandwidth usage.
(I'm not entirely sure that the webcam is solely responsible for your bandwidth either. You've got a ton of large pictures in the gallery that I'm sure everyone who browses the site clicks on and costs you the bandwidth.)

Examples:
1-do you really need an update every 30 seconds on the stall? (yep, it's still a horse ;) How about once every 5 minutes, etc.

2-get to work re-saving all those horse pictures and this time set your jpeg compression to something like 85%.

3-Cut the images down from 640x480 to something smaller. The picture 'star1.jpg' is fairly grainy to worry about saving at larger image size, and if you resample it to a smaller size, it'll probably look sharper. The image 'jimmy1.jpg' is a good example, the image is smaller (only 25% of the size) but you can still see everything you need to see.

4-for some of the images, do they really need thumbnail links to the larger image?

5-you could consider using a service like [url]www.pbase.com[/url] for hosting your galleries, but it sort of takes away from the site. tough call.

6-in looking at your message board, it looks like you have a fairly active site so you're probably just stuck with relatively heavy usage. (Sometimes it stinks to be successful! ;)

I personally think your image galleries are your major usage concern, take a look at that and see what you can do about them.

Good luck!

Thanks for all the advice, and I can't image what ar15.com pays goatboy!  what about the server winsave.com they say unlimited bandwidth do you think I can open an acount and hold them to it for very long?  



Thanks observer, I am pretty certian it is the webcam actually.  Most visitors are regulars and will only look at the picture once or twice while there are sometime hundreds of people waiting for days without sleep for a horse to be born this time of year.  Likewise with a 5 minute update on the image you could miss a birth.  I suppose I could slow it down durring the day and when a birth is not pending but few people are watching then anyway.  I think it really does peak around the pending event.  Thanks for the advise on the pictures.  The ones in the gallery are changed extreemly frequently(and therefore viewed more frequently) so I am in total agreament that they should be cut down in size and quality (since those ones aren't even are horses)  and in some cases should not even be thumbnailed.  Although the lady of the house maintains the gallery page and can't be taught or will not learn or dedicate the amount of time to modify those pictures(which come in from site visitors daily) and I likewise am not willing to make the 1hr or more time commitment a day (I know I know what am I complaing for then) so they will have to stay.  I will make some changes to the images on our other pages as they don't change often.  I guess truly being an amatuer I had no idea the web hoster charged you based on how many people view your site.

Thanks for all the ideas everybody