How to Save Bandwidth For Your Web Hosting

By Phil Anderson

It's confusing between bandwidth and data transfer, especially when web hosting companies are using the terms without much explanation. For clarification, bandwidth refers to the measurement of maximum data that can be transferred in a given time; while data transfer is the amount of data can be transferred. Fundamentally, we can understand data transfer as the consumption of bandwidth.

Hosting bandwidth affect a website performance directly. Website with lower bandwidth loads slower; vice versa website loads faster with huge bandwidth. Regardless of users Internet connection speed, your website will load slowly when the data transfer capacity is running low. Some web users will need to wait for their turn to access your website whenever the bandwidth is temporarily fully used.

How you can save bandwidth?

As bandwidth is an important asset for every website, web owners or designers should always build their website with minimum bandwidth requirement. Fancy flash presentation, huge audio and video files streaming, and high resolution images are all huge bandwidth eater. You should avoid using any of them if your web host is running out of bandwidth.

Keeping your web design clean and simple reduce bandwidth usage. Nested tables and excessive empty tags are always wasting the server resources thus should be avoided. Try design your website with CSS and JavaScript kept externally instead of burying them in every single page of your website.

Also, out of control robots can also suck down your bandwidth like a black hole. Avoid unknown bots crawling your website via a filter list on robots.txt also helps a lot in reducing bandwidth usage.

A final words for those who are getting started - getting an affordable but yet reliable web host is always the most important thing when starting of a new website. I would recommend Hostgator for those who are looking for a shared hosting as they are offering quite some good bargain at the moment. My advice to you is to take advantage on this and save some quick bucks for your hosting costs. But hey, that's my personal findings based on my own preference - in case you are doubtful, why not read further on Hostgator review? Article by Phil Anderson.