As far as hosting goes, the only thing you need to know about bandwidth is this: Bandwidth is the amount of traffic your website can recieve until your hosting provider either starts charging you for excess usage or cuts off your website.

If you have a large site with lots of heavy downloads (large photos, music files or flash movies etc) and you expect to recieve lots of traffic your gonna need lots of bandwidth. If you expect your traffic to go through the roof after an advertising campaign, your gonna need lots of bandwidth. If you have porn on your site, your gonna need lots of bandwidth.

How can you reduce your bandwidth usage? Optimize, optimize, optimize.

Firstly optimize all of your photo's and graphics. Macromedia Fireworks is a great tool for this, or failing that there are loads of free ones available online. Remember, photographs should be optimised as JPEG's, graphics with large blocks of colour should be GIF's).

It's also well worth taking steps to prevent people hotlinking to your images remotely. This can be done quite easily on Apache web servers using a .htaccess file. (more info here)

Secondly, optimise your code. If your still using the old way of doing things and piling in thousands of <font> tags then your code is going to be bloated and hog more bandwidth than is neccessary. Proper use of Cascading Style Sheets can reduce a long bloated peice of code from this:

<p><font face="verdanda, arial, courier" size="11"><bold>Bold Text</bold></font></p>

to this:

<p class="boldtext">Bold Text</p>

Get rid of code bloat and not only will your site use less bandwidth, but in team with image optimisation It'll also make your page load a hell of a lot quicker as well!

Thirdly, if you have downloads on your site make people register before allowing them to download the files. Sounds daft, but requiring registration will reduce the number of people that access your downloads in turn reducing the amount of bandwidth you use. This technique can also be used for photo galleries, movie archives and online games as well.

These three tips alone can massively reduce the amount of bandwidth your site requires and increase the page load time for your site and there are plenty more things that can be done, but I'll save them for another time.

Categorised as: Ye Olde Blog