As you build your website, and certainly as your website gets more popular or experiences increased traffic, you'll want to take a closer look at the bandwidth you're using.
- Bandwidth
- Storage and optimization of images
- Quick and reliable streaming of videos
- Better storage of PDFs and other downloads
- Finding your current bandwidth usage
- Exceeding bandwidth
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is data (such as website files, images, videos, PDFs, email messages, and other materials) transmitted over an internet connection during a specific period of time. In our case, bandwidth is measured and reset each calendar month.
Each of our website hosting accounts has bandwidth limitations, and aside from price and disk space, bandwidth is a primary consideration for many customers when choosing a plan.
Storage and optimization of images
Whether or not your website is particularly image-heavy, outsourcing your images to an external website can reduce the amount of bandwidth you're using on our servers.
While we do not support these tools directly, there are a number of free and nearly-free image-sharing sites that make it easy for your team to upload images and capture the embed codes or image links to paste into your website to be displayed. For example:
- Photobucket
- Flickr
- Imageshack
- Amazon S3
A bonus of using external image storing sites is that if a website visitor decides to copy your website image links and includes them as part of their own site, your web hosting bandwidth with us will not be affected.
Quick and reliable streaming of videos
Video is an excellent way to share information about your brand and projects.
However, only rarely should video files be uploaded to your website hosting account directly.
Website hosting providers are not optimized for smooth video streaming, so your videos do not tend to play smoothly, and video files can eat up your bandwidth limits very quickly as well.
We strongly recommend making use of video streaming sites to store your video files. Once uploaded, you can use MP4 links or embed codes to add them to your web pages for your visitors to view.
Here are three of the most popular video streaming sites:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Amazon S3
Better storage of PDFs and other downloads
Just like with images and videos, content such as PDFs, spreadsheets and other documents can both take up a fair amount of disk space and if popularly downloaded, use up quite a bit of bandwidth.
Here are two popular storage sites that have free and paid services:
- Google Drive
- DropBox
These sites (and others like them) are designed to allow for the easy storage, access, and sharing of files from any device or physical location and are excellent places to store your documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, and more.
To add the materials to your website, use a simple link to the file on your storage site or use their custom embed codes to display the information as part of your web pages.
Finding your current bandwidth usage
If you've got a Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, or Managed WordPress Hosting plan with Exact Hosting, you'll be able to find out the details of your bandwidth and disk usage in the Exact Hosting client dashboard.
Usage reporting is updated periodically throughout the day and isn't accurate as of the minute you're reviewing it. If your site is experiencing a sudden and heavy load, reach out to our support team for assistance.
Here's how to find your recent usage reports once you're logged into the Exact Hosting client dashboard:
Usage report for shared web hosting plans
If you've got a Web Hosting plan, you can review the AWStats logs inside cPanel to see detailed information about your website traffic, down to the day and the page being accessed.
You can find high-level information about your usage at a glance inside the Exact Hosting client area:
- Select the Services area.
- Click through to review details about your website hosting plan.
- Review the most recent Usage Statistics.
Usage details for WordPress/Managed WP hosting plans
- Select the Services area.
- Choose your WordPress hosting plan or Managed WordPress hosting plan to see more details.
- View your Resource Usage.
Exceeding bandwidth
On occasion, you will find your hosting plan has exceeded its bandwidth, and your website displays a message indicating the site cannot load because it has exceeded its bandwidth.
To increase your bandwidth or disk space limits, click the Upgrade/Downgrade option in the client dashboard to view what options are available to you, and reach out to support if you have questions.
Note: If your site has exceeded its bandwidth and you do not expect that much traffic, please reach out to support for assistance.
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