As your website grows and attracts more traffic, the bandwidth your hosting plan uses each month grows with it. This article explains what bandwidth is, where to find your current usage, and three strategies for keeping that usage in check by offloading images, videos, and downloadable files to external services.
What bandwidth is and why it matters
Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted between your website and visitors over an internet connection in a given period. It includes everything your site sends and receives: HTML pages, images, videos, PDFs, email messages, and other files. Exact Hosting measures and resets bandwidth each calendar month.
Every Exact Hosting plan has a monthly bandwidth limit. Bandwidth is one of the main factors (alongside price and disk space) to consider when choosing a hosting plan. If your site experiences a sudden traffic spike, large media files, or popular downloads can use up your monthly bandwidth quickly.
Before you begin
- An active Exact Hosting Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, or Managed WordPress plan. Bandwidth reporting is shown in the Exact Hosting client area for these plans.
- Knowing which assets drive your traffic. Images, videos, and downloadable files are typically the biggest contributors.
Step 1: Offload images to an external host
Even if your site isn't image-heavy, storing images on an external service reduces the bandwidth your hosting plan uses. You upload your images to the third-party service and reference them on your site by URL or embed code.
Popular image-hosting services include:
- Flickr
- Imgur
- Amazon S3
- Cloudinary
Tip: If another site copies an image URL and embeds it on their own pages, the bandwidth cost falls on the image host, not on your hosting plan.
Step 2: Stream videos from a video platform
Video files are the biggest bandwidth drain for most websites. Uploading video directly to your hosting account is rarely a good idea, because hosting servers aren't optimized for smooth video streaming and a single popular video can eat through a month's bandwidth in a day.
Instead, upload videos to a dedicated streaming service and embed them on your pages with the share/embed code. Common options include:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Amazon S3 (with CloudFront)
- Wistia
Step 3: Store downloads on a cloud storage service
PDFs, spreadsheets, and other downloadable documents take up disk space and can consume bandwidth quickly if they go viral. Move these files to a cloud storage service and link to them from your website.
Popular options include:
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Amazon S3
To include a file on your site, link to its public URL or use the service's embed code.
Step 4: Check your current bandwidth usage
The Exact Hosting client area shows recent bandwidth and disk usage for every hosting plan. The reports update periodically throughout the day, so the numbers may lag the current minute by a few hours.
Web Hosting plans
For shared Web Hosting plans, you can also use AWStats inside cPanel for detailed traffic data down to the day and page.
- Sign in to the Exact Hosting client area.
- Select Services.
- Click your web hosting plan.
- Review the most recent Usage Statistics.
WordPress and Managed WordPress plans
- Sign in to the Exact Hosting client area.
- Select Services.
- Choose your WordPress or Managed WordPress hosting plan.
- Review the Resource Usage details.
If you exceed your bandwidth
If your site exceeds its monthly bandwidth, visitors see a message saying the site can't load. You have two options:
- Upgrade your plan. In the Exact Hosting client dashboard, click Upgrade/Downgrade to see plans with higher bandwidth and disk space limits.
- Investigate unexpected traffic. If you don't expect to be using that much bandwidth, contact Exact Hosting support for help diagnosing the spike.
Next steps
- Monitor your traffic patterns inside cPanel. Review AWStats to identify which pages and files drive the most traffic.
- Compress images before you upload them. Even on external hosts, smaller files load faster for your visitors.
- Talk to support if usage is unusually high. A sudden spike often points to a misconfigured plugin, a bot, or a popularity surge worth investigating.
Questions? Contact Exact Hosting Support.
Related articles
- Speeding Up Your Website (Caching & Performance) — caching and performance tuning
- Understanding Resource Limits & "508 Resource Limit Reached" — resource limits on shared hosting
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