Let me clear up some things for some people. :)
As far as pop ups we hope to stop most of them. We still might have some here and there, but overall they will be scarace. However, if we can't generate enough money with the banners, we might have to occasionally run pop ups. However, we would do our best to set the popups up so visitors would only see 1 popup a day, or once every 6-12 hours or something. This wouldn't be bad. We hope to never return to the days of pop ups with every page view.
As far as bandwidth and what it is. Bandwidth is how much data you transfer. So crappy movies on NG that no one watches don't use any bandwidth, they just take up HD space which we have plenty of at the moment.
As far as users suggesting things on the BBS or users having to watch movies before voting using more bandwidth, it doesn't really. You have to think of things in perspective. We've been doing like 1.1 million submissions views a day. If we get 200 new entries and they are all watched 100 times that's only 20,000 views! That's nothing! The bulk of the views come from the movies on the front page which can get anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 views a day, each! So 1 movie on the front page could get way more views than all the new portal submissions coming in. Then after the front page the most viewed things are in the games, toons, and genres and series sections.
As far as the BBS it hardly uses any bandwidth. It's more database intensive if anything, but our database is running very well lately. Rarely do I see the old "NG under extreme load" errors. In the past we had enough bandwidth but not enough server power. Now we have enough server power and not enough bandwidth. If you do get error messages it is probably because there is an error or problem with one of our servers from a bad script, not over use.
Again, we do not host NG out of our house. It is hosted out of a professional hosting facility in NYC.
However, if contributers optimize their Flash files better it will help with the bandwidth.
We will be working on a page on optimization tips.
For starters always import your sounds and music as .WAV files! Get a MP3 to WAV conversion program. A typical 3MB MP3 will covert to a 30MB .WAV. Now you say "That's bigger! WTF!" Well, when you export to a .swf from your .fla Flash can't recompress an imported MP3. A 3MB MP3 exports as a 3MB MP3, probably at 128kbps or whatever they are. If you import a .WAV file Flash can compress that bitch down to 24-32kbps. Sure it's not CD quality, but if you watch my bumble bee movie I compressed a pretty long MP3 down to 32kbps and it sounds good to me and the file size is like 500k for the whole movie! The other option would be to compress the MP3's down to 24-32kbps before importing them into Flash. I find it's easier to just import a .WAV and let Flash compress it.
Then as far as images go, if you import a high quality JPG at 1280x960 pixels that's 500k or something, it will export at 500k. If you import a .BMP Flash can compress it into a heavier JPG. What I do is make my images as small as I can pixel wise (If my movie size is 550x400 and the image is only half the size of the screen I could make it 275x200 pixels, or whatever), and then compress them as much as I can without making them look to artifacted (grainy). So after all this most of my images would be 10-30k.
Then try not to make more keyframes than you need. Set your audio to STREAM if you are syncing animation to it. Also be sure to make everything symbols, etc.
Also when you import music if you can get away with using a loop rather than a whole song this will greatly reduce your file size. Hope this helps.
