Unlmited bandwidth

BANDWIDTH (monthly traffic, or data transfer) is the amount of megabytes of data in the traffic to and from your website. It includes (a) website data viewed by your visitors, (b) files loaded by you to the website and (c) emails. Generally (a) makes up most of your bandwidth, because (b) is only when you update your web pages and (c) is usually a few kilobytes a day. (However, once a student tried to email us 100 Mb of images, but that was an unusual instance).

• :
  This the volume in kilobytes of your files that are being downloaded to visitors screens.

  If your website is live, then your host can provide summaries through traffic analysers like Webalizer or AWStats to show how many kilobytes of traffic your site has.

  But if you are not yet at that stage, once you know the total size of your files, you can estimate your monthly traffic by multiplying that size by the expected number of visits per month. This can be a little complex, because all visitors may not look at all files on your site.

  • Small websites:
    Say you get 1,000 visitors per month (33 per day) looking at web files totalling 300 Kb. That equals 300 Megabytes (300,000 Kb) of traffic per month.

    What could make up 300 Kb of files? Well, an A4 page of text can take 6Kb. Adding a picture averaging say 50Kb on each page makes 56Kb per page, multiply by 5 pages equals 280 Kb. Add 20Kb for some javascript and style sheets and you have 300 Kb for 5 pages. If 1,000 visitors looked at 300 Kb of web pages your traffic is still only 300 Mb per month.

  • Larger websites:
    Our own website averaged 17,000 visitors per month over the last 6 months, but the traffic averaged only 1,075 Mb per month for that period. That is because most of our 250 or so web pages are text only with no graphics.

• How to optimize file sizes:
  • HTML text files are very small, although we have seen files created in MS Office programs four times the size they need be.
  • Image files can be large in terms of kilobytes. Check their size in Windows Explorer. Our image files average less than 50 KB. If yours are larger than 100 Kb then try optimizing them by compressing with a graphics program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
  • Websites with a large number of images optimize for traffic by displaying thumbnail files which click through to the full sized image file. Then only the image required to be viewed in full will add to the traffic.
  • One 200 Kb image viewed by 2,000 visitors adds 400 Mg to your traffic. Compress it to 50 Kb and you save 100 Mb traffic.

We are now able to offer unlimited bandwidth (monthly traffic) with our top Linux hosting plans.

Unlimited bandwidth suits retailers with images of a large volume of products and a high volume of visitors. Websites selling toys, lingerie and other clothing, downloading music, videos and large files, attract a lot of visitors, window shoppers actually, and all need unlimited bandwidth.

Wednesday, 4th March 2015
Newcastle, Australia