How To Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth Copyright 2002 by Herman Drost 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
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 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 file, higher bandwidth usage when it is downloaded. The more traffic to your site, more bandwidth you will use.
What does “bandwidth” mean? Bandwidth refers to amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The “data transfer rate” is 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 file size of each web page, and then multiply it by number of pages on your web site.
Multiply this figure by number of 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 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.
