Picasa Web Albums

So it would appear that Google's Picasa Web Albums is off-line, and I'm not really sure how long they've been down. The web site [Engineering Portal]  uses a lot of grapics and pic files, but not all of them are local to my server. I off-load some of them to Picasa to keep the server bandwidth down, which runs around 13G Bytes a month. Right, if someone else is serving the picture files then my bandwidth is not effected.

It's hard to say how many pic files reside on my server, as they could still reside in one of my directories but not used any more. So the count is an estimate but it would appear there are 687 picture files local to my server [give or a take]. Picasa on the other hand is serving another 919 graphic files [or not]. Because it appears that currently there are over 900 pic files not showing up on the web site.

So is it a good idea to up-load your files to another server? Well if your doing it to shows friends, sure. But what about if your trying to run a business? I guess I don't have an answer, but I am saving on my bandwidth. It's not saving me any money because my bandwidth limit is much higher than 13GB. What I am saving, or enhancing, is page load-time [I hope]. If the page is downloaded from my server and a pic file is downloaded from Picaca the visitor should see the page render faster. Or what if the files were on my server, what would be the bandwidth then?
Maybe a standard graphic file is 10 to 20K, and there are over 360,000 page views a month [over 380,000 page views this month]. That seems like a lot of down-loading [saved]......

So I see that the graphics are down in blogger as well [this blog]. I guess that makes sense because Google stores the blog graphics in Picasa too. I was going to attach a graphic showing server bandwidth vs page views, so that will have to wait. I'll add a link to this posing as a comment a bit later [SEO Techniques]. And it seems like just a few days ago the web site was off-line for a few hours too.

Oh, SEO stuff; the website link 'Engineering Portal' points to the normal site, I'm just using a different term to describe it ~ for the search engines. To try and insure the words are assigned to my home page , or related to...