With RSS and similar technologies in their current state, publishers run the risk of using significantly more bandwidth than with an email newsletter. Why? Let's say you have a list with 20000 subscribers. If you email them all a 2K newsletter once a day, that's 40MB\/day of bandwidth. If you have an RSS feed with the last 10 2K stories in it, and the same number of subscribers load it once an hour 4 hours a day, that's 1.6GB\/day, if they don't use If-Modified-Since or ETag, and even if they do, it's 400MB\/day plus a lot of brief connections when they check for updates. These numbers aren't precise since they don't account for differences like headers and such, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n
So how do we stave off the problem? A few possibilities:<\/p>\n
1) Build more infrastructure so that we can use more bandwidth for a similar price. I'm sure this will happen over time, but will it be soon enough?<\/p>\n
2) Limit people to less frequent downloads, and enforce the limitation. Some sort of access frequency limitation technology is probably a good idea for any reasonably high-bandwidth feed. Slashdot, for example, stops giving you their feed if you load more than once per hour (that's the stated limit. I'm sure they've built a little flexibility into it).<\/p>\n
3) You could force people to use tools that do conditional gets using If-Modified-Since and \/or ETag headers. You'd probably cut a lot of your readership out if you did this today, but if you've got an important feed, this might help light a fire under developers to implement these bandwidth-saving features.<\/p>\n
4) Don't put too much in your feed. Read my post from yesterday: \"Bandwidth Kills - Blog Responsibly\".<\/p>\n
5) Have multiple version of your feed with different amounts of data in them, and try to get people to subscribe to the smallest one that meets their needs.<\/p>\n
6) Use a syndication format with an API that supports loading only the most recently updated items in a feed. I'm not sure whether Atom supports this yet, though I believe they will eventually if not now. Info Bite will support this too. Perhaps an extension could be written for RSS to enable doing this too.<\/p>\n
I'm all for replacing email with syndication for many uses, but there are challenges yet to be met before syndication is an ideal solution for everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With RSS and similar technologies in their current state, publishers run the risk of using significantly more bandwidth than with an email newsletter. Why? Let's say you have a list with 20000 subscribers. If you email them all a 2K newsletter once a day, that's 40MB\/day of bandwidth. If you have an RSS feed with...
[read more<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atomrss","category-email"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeta.geckotribe.com\/alpha-gecko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}