rss feeds and bandwidth

They have: 140 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

If someone uses rss feeds from my site....... do I get hit with any bandwidth usage? or is it the person pulling the rss feed that gets hit........ or is it both?

He has: 1,380 posts

Joined: Feb 2002

It depends. Would you be hosting the RSS feed yourself on your own server space? Or would you be offering that RSS feed through other services (I think FeedBurner is an example of one...but don't quote me on that)?

The point is that if they are hosted on your server, then the obvious answer is 'yes'. Any sort of content or traffic that is going across your server is going to cost bandwidth. However, RSS feeds are a huge deal because of the amount of bandwidth they actually use... very little. The whole point, as I'm sure you know, of RSS feeds is to just get the pure content...

What does that mean? Well, that means not running any scripts (AJAX/JavaScript, PHP, or otherwise), not processing CSS files, not loading all of your ads/images/videos/other things, etc. If done right, RSS feeds can save alot of bandwidth if they are used to delivery purely content in a structured XML file.

...hopefully that helps?

They have: 140 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

yes, that helps. thank you.

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