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Are you monitoring your web
site's bandwith? Most web site hosting programs
give you a limited amount of bandwith, but if your
site processes a lot of transactions or offers popular
downloads, you could be testing the limits of your
allocation. Just as you want web site performance
monitoring to ensure your shopping carts, forms
and page downloads are functioning, so too should
you monitor bandwith usage so you don't get caught
on the 24th of the month turning customers away. |
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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.
For more information on optimizing images for the Web,
read my article, "Preparing Images for Your Web
Site", (www.isitebuild.com/imageoptimization2).
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 Site Design and Low
Cost Hosting from $30/year. (http://www.isitebuild.com)
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