Wednesday, October 1, 2008

How to Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth

By Bob Willis

At times exceeding your monthly bandwidth would mean higher monthly hosting bills and that could have long-term implications on your hosting budget. Some hosting companies may charge an additional fee for exceeding the monthly bandwidth allowance also referred to as "bandwidth overage". For the novice Webmaster it is important to understand what exactly is bandwidth usage, how much bandwidth is required by his/her website and most importantly how can he reduce his website hosting bandwidth.

Bandwidth refers to the total amount of information that has been served to your web site visitors each month. So every time, the visitor requests information or downloads files from your website, your bandwidth would go up by a specific amount. The size of the file is directly proportional to the bandwidth usage. Also, more the traffic your website receives, more would be the bandwidth consumption. Bandwidth or 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.

It is important to determine the amount of bandwidth that your website would require in order to balance your hosting budget. You can determine your bandwidth requirement by estimating the file size for each web page and then multiplying that figure by the number of pages on your website. Let us explain this with an example. If a web page comprises of two 15Kb images and 3Kb of html, then the web page would have a total data of 33kb. Now multiply this by the number of page views you expect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). This would mean that 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per month for that page.

Now by calculating the final figure for each page you would get a rough estimate of the amount of bandwidth required for your website.

If the user requires a reduction in the monthly bandwidth consumption, then a few points and tips can help him achieve this.

The user can reduce the size of the files on their website like the images and graphics. So for a large image size of (e.g. 200KB), by reducing the file size to 20KB the web owner can dramatically minimize their bandwidth usage as well as speed up their website performance.

Websites that feature MP3 downloads, movies, music, large images or other multimedia enabled features, then the website bandwidth requirement would increase substantially.

On the other hand, a simple text based website or a website featuring html pages or small images would require a lower bandwidth.

It is vital to determine beforehand the amount of bandwidth that your website would in order to avoid loss in revenue or traffic. Once you have a specific figure, you will be ready to receive more traffic and subsequent sales. You can also avoid paying a higher bandwidth fee for additional bandwidth usage.


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