How To Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth

Copyright 2002 Herman Drost

You just received a higher than normal monthly bill on yourcredit card for web hosting. Your hosting company explainsthat you exceeded your monthly minimum for “bandwidthusage” and suggests reducing the size of your web sitefiles.

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 beenserved 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 whenit 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 speedwith 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 thefile size of each web page, and then multiply it by the numberof pages on your web site.

Multiply this figure by the number of the number of pageviews you expect per month from your site.

For example, if your web page consists of two 15Kb imagesand 3Kb of html, you would have 33Kb of data for thatpage. Now multiply this by the number of page views youexpect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). Thiswould mean 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per monthfor 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 havea large image (i.e. 200KB) on your web page that is downloadedby each visitor every time the page is requested. If youreduce this image to 20KB or remove it altogether, it willdramatically cut your bandwidth usage. It will also speedup your site’s performance.

For more information on optimizing images for the Web, readmy article, “Preparing Images for Your Web Site”,

Web Sites that have MP3s to download, movies, music playingin the background and large images, will obviously have ahigher bandwidth. Large web sites or sites that expect alot 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 addingmore files and/or web pages, recalculate your web sitefile size.

Estimate how many visitors will be accessing your web pagesover the next few months.

Recalculate the bandwidth usage for your site. You may needmore web space and bandwidth for your site to function effectively.

Check with your web hosting company to upgrade yourhosting plan.

Conclusion
Now you can avoid the shock of exceeding yourmonthly bandwidth usage and paying higher hosting fees.
You are now ready to receive more traffic to your site andtherefore make more sales.

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Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)o
wner and author of iSiteBuild.com
Low Cost Hosting and Site Design

Subscribe to the “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original
articles. subscribe@isitebuild.com

Free Web Hosting Versus Paid Web Hosting

When you want to have an Internet presence you need to build a website. Having a website means you have to avail of web hosting services that will host and upload your website in the Internet. One can get web hosting services for free, while one can also pay for the web hosting services. There are advantages and disadvantages for getting both types of services.

As it is, free web hosting service is more economical. It is an ideal choice for those just starting out with their websites. The problem however is that it can have a lot of disadvantages. There are a lot of limitations such as limited web space and bandwidth. This means that the website owner cannot put a lot of files and content on the website. Also there are instances when the website can go offline especially if it exceeds the maximum use of resources. This can be very frustrating for website owners that need to have their website always online particularly during peak seasons. Thus it is not recommended for those who have websites for business purposes to get of free web hosting services.

On the other paid hosting is more suited for those who have website for commercial purposes. Paid hosting provides more web space and bandwidth, allowing the website owner to put more pictures, graphics , and content on his or her website. This type of hosting also provides good customer support, enabling the website to be always online especially during peak seasons.


Article Tags: Web Host, Webhosting, Hosting
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/web-hosting-articles/free-web-hosting-versus-paid-web-hosting-469603.html

Free Web Hosting Tips

Can you really get FREE web hosting?

Yes, there are hundreds of free hosting web sites, as far as not having to pay any money to have your website hosted. Generally they either cost you in time, web hosting restrictions, or modifying your free web pages by adding popups, banners, or other adverts. When looking for free web hosting (especially on search engines), you should beware that there are also a large number of commercial web hosts that claim to offer free hosting services, but those often have a catch, such as paying an excessive amount for a domain name or other service, and therefore aren't really free. The free free hosting guide below will give you some tips for finding the right free webhosting comapny for you.

How do the free web hosts make money?

The free website hosts often make money in other ways, such as putting banners, popups, or popunders ads on your free webpages. Some free web hosting companies do not put ads on your site, but require you as the webmaster to click on banners in their control panel or signup process, or just display banners in the file manager in hopes you will click them. Some lure visitors with free hosting in hopes you will upgrade and pay for advanced features. A few send you occasional emails with ads, or may even sell your email address. A new method that is becoming popular is requiring a certain number of "quality" forum posting, usually as a means of getting free content for them and thereby being able to display more ads to their website visitors.

Are free web hosts reliable?

Generally no, although there are a few exceptions. If the free host is making money from banner ads or other revenue sources directly from the free hosting service, then they likely will stay in business, provided someone doesn't abuse their web hosting server with spam, hacking, etc., as often happens to new free web hosting companies with liberal signup policies. If the freehost accepts just anyone, especially with an automated instant activation and it offers features such as PHP or CGI, then some users invariably try to find ways to abuse it, which can cause the free server to have a lot of downtime or the free web server to be slow. It is best if you choose a very selective free hoster which only accepts quality sites (assuming you have one).

Uses for free webspace

The best place to search for free webhosting is on a free webspace directory website (i.e. a web site which specializes in listing only free web hosting providers). There are some which add new free hosts pretty much every week (and if it is updated often, has usually had to delete about as many). There are also many which almost never update their web site, and a huge percent of their links and info are outdated. Unfortunately that includes most of the directories that were the best several years ago. The problem is free hosts change so often, and most fold up in less than a year (often even after only a day or two), that it is hard to keep such a freehosting directory up-to-date. The most recommended free web space directory is Free Web Hosting (http://www.free-webhosts.com/), which has a detailed list of over 500 free web hosting providers with user reviews, ratings, and free hosting searchable database. It is updated daily, and the advanced free web hosting search has 42 options, helping you to find the free hosting package with all the features you need, such as CGI, PHP, MySQL, ASP, SSI, Ruby on Rails, FrontPage server extensions, and even free cpanel web hosting.

For a smaller, more selective list of the best free hosts, there are also these free webspace hosting directories:Best Free Webspace (http://www.100-Best-Free-Webspace.com/)Free Hosting (http://www.Absolutely-Free-Hosting.com/)Free Webspace (http://www.free-webspace.org/)Other (usually less useful) resources include subcategories of freebies sites, search engines and directories, and forums. Your ISP might also supply you with free webhosting.

Hints for finding the best free web hosting service

Generally it is best not to choose a free hosting package with more features than you need, and also check to see if the company somehow receives revenue from the free hosting itself to keep it in business. As already mentioned, it is best to try to get accepted to a more selective free host if possible. Look at other sites hosted there to see what kind of ads are on your site, and the server speed (keep in mind newer hosts will be faster at first). Read the Terms of Service (TOS) and host features to make sure it has enough bandwidth for your site, large webspace and file size limit, and any scripting options you might need. Read free webspace reviews and ratings by other users on free hosting directories. If you don't have your own domain name, you might want to use a free URL forwarding service so you can change your site's host if needed.

Recommended free web hosts

It would be awfully hard to recommend any free web space host and someone not like it, as different people need different web hosting features and have different priorities, and the webhosting quality may change over time. Also some people want free domain hosting (you own the domain), and others might not be able to buy a domain name. Here are some of the most recommended free web hosts, and their main features.

50Webs (http://www.50webs.com/) gives you a URL such as http://you.50webs.com/ (or you can use your own domain name), and offers 60 MB webspace, POP3 email, and unlimited bandwidth. You can upload via a file manger or FTP import. There are no ads or popups placed on your hosted web pages. You can setup multiple addon domains and subdomains under the same web hosting account

Yahoo Geocities (http://geocities.yahoo.com/home/) is controversial. Many people hate the ads they put on your site or its other limitations, but it is one of the oldest and most reliable free web hosts. Your URL looks like http://www.geocities.com/you . They give you 15 MB webspace, file manager and editor, web-based Email, and statistics. The bandwidth limit is 3 GB/month, and the file size limit is 5 MB. You can upload several file types such as RealAudio, RealVideo, Flash, MP3, and Java, but other scripting is not supported.

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