FWIW — that customer was charged +$500 in excess bandwidth fees the first month his store went live — and he wanted to clone the store for two additional markets. The work I did will save him ((+$500 * 3) * 12) per year .. or roughly +$18k/yr that he never anticipated being charged when he signed up with Volusion.

I got a call this afternoon from another Volusion store owner — they are using 200GB excess bandwidth and being charged $4.00/GB, (+$800/mo). Volusion is clobbering store owners with the bandwidth fees.

It seems adding CDN and other “features” is just a way to complicate the image hosting and put more profit in Volusions pocket.

*** NOTICE TO ANYONE CONSIDERING USING VOLUSION: Make sure you know what your bandwidth usage will be before investing a lot of time and money into building your business on Volusion’s platform!!!! ****

[NOTE:promotional text about specific cloud service removed]

<script type="text/javascript">
function getImages() {
var ThisDomain=document.domain;
var ImgServer='www.image-server-domain-name.com';
var images = document.getElementsByTagName("IMG");
var numOfImages = images.length;
var origImage;
for(i=0;i<numOfImages;i++) {
origImage = images[i].src;
if(origImage.indexOf('/v/vspfiles/photos/') != -1) {
NewImgSrc = origImage.replace(ThisDomain,ImgServer);
document.getElementsByTagName("img")[i].src =NewImgSrc;
}
}
}
window.onload = getImages;
</script>

Replace “image-server-domain-name” with the actual domain name of your image server.

Go to Settings > Maintenance > Disable CDN.

We have done this on several Volusion sites with absolutely no impact to the speed that pages or images display, (in fact we’ve had customers who say the images appear faster without CDN in general). So long as you use a quality hosting company for the image server, (one with fast connections to the internet), you and your customers should have no problem.