Thinking about user bandwidth amounts.
 

I've been making gifs for my sites for years and realize the power behind that type of content. (Viral marketing via Reddit etc)
The only issue is the amount of bandwidth they take up while hosting them on whatever server the website is setup on.
Would hosting gifs on sites like IMGUR and placing IMG links within my page rather than uploading the gif to my CMS effect user bandwidth? Would it effect other areas of SEO since the image would be a link to another hosting site rather than original content uploaded straight into the CMS?
A quick example. My site SmokingChaos.com currently has one image that I've been monitoring in AWstats and noticing the large amounts of server bandwidth being used. I would hate for mobile users to browse my site and run into data usage and load time issues.

Probably an amateur question but it's a hump I'm trying to get over in my developing process. Help me out.

Crickets.
Come on guys. Not a tough one.
I will have a front page of gifs and want to know if hosting them on a 3rd party would help the users and/or effect my SEO?
DM me if need be.

It is always better to host your content yourself, but there are also several disadvantages (bandwidth, disk space usage to name a few). You may resize your gifs and pictures pretty easily if you are using WordPress. There are plugins for this: EWWW Image Optimizer or Resize Image After Upload.

They are already sized small (300 x 166)
Still average 11-15MB each though. I have unlimited bandwidth. But I'm just wondering if it matters at all as far as my users go.

That file size seems very large

Possibly try compress it if you can

It seems quite a lot 11-15 MB for single gif. I have no experience in compressing gifs, but jpgs can be drastically compressed without loosing much visible quality (by 50% in average).

I think OP is talking about animated gifs that can be quite big.

I'm not sure what's your issue/question exactly. If you have decent hosting with enough BW, you should be fine hosting the content yourself.

My whole understanding on how bandwidth is consumed by a user.
I'm not worried about BW limits on my end, but say the surfer comes to my page where I have my animated gifs, is his load time or the amount of bandwidth he is consuming effected by me hosting rather than having it integrated with an [IMG] link from lets say IMGUR? AND....does that also effect SEO?

Yes they still stay fairly large. Most of the clipsites producers (Clips4sale, Manyvids, IWantClips) use them in their descriptions as a cover or preview.
They are already compressed and messed around with to get them to 300 x 166
Also a little tweak with the amount of colors.
They pretty much trigger a buyer and can lead to a sale.

As I said, If you have quality hosting with enough resouces you should be fine and it's better host those animated gifs yourself.

Thanks.
Yeah I think I'm going to just put static images like .jpg on the front page and have them link to subpages showing the animated gifs.
That way the entire page of gifs isn't trying to all play at once and slugging resources or consuming a users entire data plan.

asynchronous image loading would solve your problem i think..

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I don't know about SEO but notwithstanding, don't put the images elsewhere. Bandwidth is a non-issue. You can use CloudFlare's free CDN to cache them if you are concerned with the hosting fees from bandwidth. Also, OVH has extremely cheap bandwidth if that is your concern.

Lazy load them so only the images that are visible get loaded with the page, and the rest only download if the user scrolls down the page.

asynchronous loading.
we do it standard on our default bootstrap template.

:upsidedow

Compress as much as you can for Mobile users, it will reduce the quality but no other option i think

This is absolutely right...i had a big issue with excessive bandwidth usage for years until i started to use CloudFlare.

About the imgur, it is against their rules to use their bandwith...i lost all gifs from one of my websites when imgur forbade hotlinking... i was getting big amount of traffic for a couple of months so they noticed that and my website was banned...

About the SEO, you dont have to worry...just do not exaggerate with number of gifs per page... keep your page sizes bellow 20mb and everything will be okay...keep the full sized gifs on homepage and archives if you want to be crawled properly by SE...small and low quality pics and thumbnails are not good for SEO

If you decided to create GIF website than you should offer gifs to people, not pics or thumbnails