How to Reduce Your Bandwidth Consumption

Most hosting providers nowadays offer unlimited or abnormally high amounts of bandwidth to the point where you may not have to considered the need to reduce your bandwidth consumption. However, for those hosting websites on their own networks or with hosts that have limited network capacity or bandwidth limitations, conserving bandwidth may be necessary in order to manage performance and costs. Here are a few tips for reducing your bandwidth:

Downsize your files

Every time a visitor does something on your website, it uses bandwidth. One mistake that newer designers make is creating image-heavy layouts or uploading oversized images and other types of files for visitors to access, which may not only increase your bandwidth usage, but also consume excessive resources on your hosting server. If you host images, make sure you’re not uploading the huge originals and simply resizing them in your HTML code with <img> tags – resize them on your PC to the size you want to display before putting them on your website. Similarly, swap out an image-heavy layout to one that is more simple, or that uses a large number of smaller image “slices” rather than single, large files. Your website will also load more quickly. 

Don’t overshare

Offering file downloads is a must for some people, but be wary of those that may abuse the privilege of being able to download files from your website. If you have a lot of large files to share, consider restricting them to certain people or implementing a system that limits how many times a person can download a specific file. Also be aware of people that “hotlink” files from your website. Hotlinking occurs when another website loads media directly from your website or server, rather than hosting the content and serving it themselves. You can learn about implementing hotlink protection here:

http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/ 

Use a CDN

In situations where bandwidth usage is extremely high, a CDN may be a possibility. A CDN (content delivery network) is typically used to host large amounts of media to be served to website visitors as opposed to the content being served directly from the website’s server. When high amounts of bandwidth are required, a CDN tends to be more cost-effective than paying bandwidth premiums.