What does bandwidth mean? or what does it mean when my hosting says 'bandwidth exceeded' or bandwidth limit close to being exceeded'
Bandwidth also refers to data transfer. It is a term to calculate the rate of traffic / data flowing between your website and visitors on the internet. So when a visitor views a page on your website, depending on the amount of images / text on the page, it is using bandwidth to view the page. Websites with heavy imagery will use more bandwidth because images take up more space then a text document. Bandwidth usage also depends on the amount of visitors your website gets. You will find during sales and promotions your website uses more bandwidth because your website has more visitors.
Your email also uses bandwidth. So sending large files constantly will account for bandwidth usage.
Ways to reduce bandwidth:
- Using your hosting control panel analyse what is using the most bandwidth.
- Use smaller images
- Use less images
- Make sure videos are externally hosted (i.e on youtube) and not streamed directly from the website.
- Make sure images are optimised for size and quality
- Block unnecessary robots
Robots from search engines, crawl your website to index the pages, this also uses bandwidth. If you experience a high amount of bandwidth usage out of the blue, often it can be from robots crawling your website unnecessarily. SPG can block robots except from essential ones such as google, to reduce bandwidth usage.
SPG can easily increase your account bandwidth usage to account for increased visitors / needs. Contact us increase your hosting plan.
