Website Bandwidth

All websites generate bandwidth when they are accessed, but what is bandwidth?

Put simply, it is the amount of data used by people visiting your website each month. Every time they access a page on your website, the HTML file for that page and any images are transferred to their computer for display on their screen. The transfer of these files generates a certain amount of data transfer bandwidth. This transfer is recorded and a monthly total produced.

The Weblogs/Webstat information available with every hosting solution from 3 Legs Ltd shows the current usage for this month and the historical usage for previous months. Below is an example of one of the weblog summery tables. The bandwidth is listed in the red headed column "KBytes". There are 1000KB in a MB and 1,000,000KB in a GB.

Each hosting solution sold by 3 Legs Ltd has a Monthly allowance. If you exceed this allowance you will be charged an excess bandwidth charge. This charge is determined by a fixed price per MB over the monthly allowance.

Please Note
3 Legs Ltd only charges for bandwdith used by people visiting your website. We do not charge for data uploaded to the website.

Bandwidth Saving Tips

There are a number of ways that you can save bandwidth.

1. One of the best ways is to ensure that only the people you are marketing at visit your website. For example if you are only selling to a UK market, don't advertise your website globally. This will only generate visits from people who cannot purchase your goods or services and will eat up bandwidth.
    
2. The next thing you can look at doing is to reduce the amount of images used on your website, since they generate bandwidth. This is especially important for your most visited pages. Consider using text-based menus and page headings instead of images. If you have a list of products or categories, consider removing any photos from the list, making them simple text lists. Also consider re-using the same image more than once within your website.
    
3. Flash Animation can also eat up bandwidth. Consider removing flash animation from frequently visited pages.
    
4. Optimise the images on your website. Reducing the number of colours in a GIF image or increasing the compression (or reducing image quality) in JPEG images will reduce their file size and ultimately the bandwidth used to display them.