Bandwidth for web hosting is a little different from how the term originated. As a web host, we use the term bandwidth for any amount of transfer in and out of the website through the World Wide Web. We provide a certain amount depending on your plan and as that amount of transfer (bandwidth) is used in gigs your limit gets used up. Web hosts that give unlimited bandwidth are capping, meaning your connection slows down as more is used by you or the others on that network. We allow you to always have full speed, trust us, having a slow-down when your customer is trying to make a payment is not good!
How much bandwidth do you need?
To determine how much bandwidth your website will need, you must first estimate how big each website page on your site is, and how many people are going to view your website. To do this, add up the size of every image on the web page and the size of the web page's HTML files. Then multiply this figure by the number of views you expect for that page per month. For example; if you had three 10k images on your page and a 2k HTML file, you would have 32k of data on that page. Multiply that by your expected page views (let's say 100,000 per month), and you get 3.2G of data to be transferred that month for that page. Now re-calculate this number for each page, and you will know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires. Keep in mind, you can upgrade or downgrade with us anytime for no extra fees other than the new plan.
How can I save bandwidth?
1. Keep your pages as small as possible
This means clean HTML and CSS programming to reduce file size. Compacting your videos, pictures, and graphics to reduce image size. Most photo editing programs will have an option to compress the file and choose the type. For images of real-life things use JPG, for animations use GIF or PNG. PNG is a bigger file but has cleaner lines.
2. Secure your website
Policing is the most basic method of preventing theft of your bandwidth. Analyze search engines, logs, and other sites to find out who's using your images (and your bandwidth) without permission. Once you've identified the offenders, you can contact them and order them to stop linking to your site (and if they try to feed you a story about everything on the Internet being in the "public domain," don't buy it). Unfortunately, policing sites yourself is a time-consuming task. Hotlink protection takes the action into your hands. All sites will be blocked unless you add them to your .htaccess file. We have Hot Link Protection in your cPanel. More information is also available on our blog here .htaccess tips
3. Remote host your images and videos
There are many image hosting and video hosting services that will allow you to host your files there. By doing this, it splits up the bandwidth and load time between different hosts. The issue with most free image and video hosts is slower connections than a premium host like WebHost.pro. Having accounts on multiple servers can help split up the traffic and speed up the load time as well.
4. Have a welcome page
By adding a front welcome page, visitors who came to your site on accident can detour before loading a large page with major content. This will help your site run faster and save tons of bandwidth. It's also a great way to advertise something nonchalantly.
5. Add Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a free filtering system that allows you to save bandwidth and have more security. It filters out all the bad traffic and speeds up the good traffic.
