If you’re currently a feed publisher, chances are, you’re familiar with the bandwidth increase that occurs every time your audience reads the latest update to your feed that for some webmasters lead to the possibility of exceeding monthly bandwidth limitations. There’s an easy solution.

Burn your feed with FeedBurner. They’re happy to take the burden off your server. (And yes, they say, FeedBurner is one word.)

There are other sites that help manage this issue, but few have all the same features under one roof at no cost.

Whether you’ve just created your news feed or you have been RSS-ing for years, you can create a free account at their site.

Their service will also:

• translate your feed from Atom to RSS or vice versa,
• make a browser-friendly page that explains what web feeds are to the new user,
• allow you to splice any link into your feed using some of the more popular social bookmarking services.

•  make an Atom or RSS 1.0 feed podcast-compatible

  and ping Audo Weblogs when you update.

FeedBurner also allows you to study your demographic by giving you statistics on how many request have been made for your feed contents, down to the item if you like.

However, if your blog software already offers your feed in multiple flavors, and your site isn’t publishing new items every 15 minutes to an hour, the increase in bandwidth you may see probably won’t make a dent in a professional web hosting account.

FeedBurner isn’t for every user.  For example, if the aforementioned issues don’t concern you and you feel that you don’t need statistical informaton at that level, all the bells and whistles would probably seem extraneous to you.

Those new to RSS also find the services a bit complex to use. But if your blog software doesn’t offer feeds is multiple formats, it’s worth the time invested learning to use it.