How
to Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth
How to Reduce Web Hosting
Bandwidth
You just received a higher than normal monthly bill
on your credit card for web hosting. Your hosting company explains
that you exceeded your monthly minimum for “bandwidth usage”
and suggests reducing the size of your web site files.
What is bandwidth usage?
What does bandwidth mean?
How much bandwidth do you need?
How can you reduce bandwidth usage?
Let’s discuss each of these topics in more depth.
What is “bandwidth usage?”
This refers to the total amount of information that has been served
to your web site visitors each month. Every file on your Web Site
has a specific size (e.g. 22K). Every time a
visitor downloads that file, your bandwidth usage goes up by that
amount.
The larger the file, the higher the bandwidth usage when it is
downloaded. The more traffic to your site, the more bandwidth you
will use.
What does “bandwidth” mean?
Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted
in a fixed amount of time. The “data transfer rate”
is the speed with which data can be transmitted from one device
to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits)
or megabytes (million bytes) per second.
These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and Mbps, respectively.
Bits and Bytes
8 bits = 1 byte.
1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (Kb).
1,024 kilobytes (Kb) = 1 megabyte (mb or meg)
1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (gb or gig)
How much bandwidth do I need?
To determine how much bandwidth you need, estimate
the file size of each web page, and then multiply it by the number
of pages on your web site.
Multiply this figure by the number of the number of page views
you expect per month from your site.
For example, if your web page consists of two 15Kb images and 3Kb
of html, you would have 33Kb of data for that page. Now multiply
this by the number of page views you expect to have per month (e.g.
100,000 per month). This would mean 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred
per month for that page.
Now recalculate this number for each page, and you’ll know
approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.
How can you reduce bandwidth usage?
The easy way is to reduce the size of the files on your site,
particularly images and other graphics. For example, you have a
large image (i.e. 200KB) on your web page that is downloaded by
each visitor every time the page is requested. If you reduce this
image to 20KB or remove it altogether, it will dramatically cut
your bandwidth usage. It will also speed
up your site’s performance.
Web Sites that have MP3s to download, movies, music playing in
the background and large images, will obviously have a higher bandwidth.
Large web sites or sites that expect a lot of traffic, will also
use a lot.
If your site has mainly html pages and small images, your bandwidth
will not be that high.
Bandwidth Tools
Monitoring bandwidth
http://www.utoronto.ca/ucres/netup.htm
Web Page Checker
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/page_size.cgi
Tuning up your Web Site
http://websitegarage.netscape.com/
Bandwidth Tips
If you make changes to your site by adding more files and/or web
pages, recalculate your web site file size.
Estimate how many visitors will be accessing your web pages over
the next few months.
Recalculate the bandwidth usage for your site. You may need more
web space and bandwidth for your site to function effectively.
Check with your web hosting company to upgrade your hosting plan.
Conclusion
Now you can avoid the shock of exceeding your monthly bandwidth
usage and paying higher hosting fees. You are now ready to receive
more traffic to your site and therefore make more sales.
About the Author
Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and
author of iSiteBuild.com
Web Site Design and Low Cost Hosting (http://www.isitebuild.com)
Subscribe to the “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more
original articles. subscribe@isitebuild.com
Related resources
Bandwidth
Or Data Transfer - Which is Which?
Too often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the
same breath but truth be known they are different although very
closely related. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at
a time and data transfer is how much data is being transferred.
Bandwidth Or Data Transfer
Too often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the
same breath but truth be known they are different although very
closely related. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at
a time and data transfer is how much data is being transferred.
What
is Bandwidth / Download?
Bandwidth is a measure of the amount of data passing through a network
at a given time. Things like huge images on web pages and needless
questions posted to Usenet newsgroups waste bandwidth which could
be better utilized for transferring information.
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