- The host will make your website inaccessible until you pay the overage amount, or until you pay to increase your hosting bandwidth space.

- The host will continue to let your bandwidth go over the allotted amount and charge you overage fees at the end of the month.

What are the bandwidth monsters?… 

1) Traffic to your website. Visitors to your website use bandwidth by opening up the html pages and images on those pages.

2) Images on your website. Images come in many sizes and dimensions. Make sure that you compress images as small as you can in KB without losing too much quality.

3) Image leeching. Sometimes other websites will link to your images. This is especially true with websites that have wallpapers, or popular images. Instead of the website saving the image to their host, they include the image in their website with a link to the image on your host. Check to see if your host offers “Leech Protection”. If the host doesn’t, then you can change your image now and then and have the old image become an advertisement for your website. The website doing the image leeching won’t like this.

4) Size of html files. Web pages with a lot of text will add to the size of the html file. Each time the web page is loaded, your visitors are using some of the bandwidth allotted.

5) Audio, Video, and Flash. Audio, video, and flash files are generally pretty large in kb size. If every web page has flash on it, that file is loaded, using bandwidth. This is the same for each time a visitor clicks on the link for the audio/video files.

6) Incoming and outgoing email. File attachments, and message sizes contribute to your bandwidth use. Yes, even spam uses bandwidth!

7) FTP uploading. Some hosts will count your FTP uploading of images, videos, audios, flash, and html files as bandwidth usage.

Backend images. You may not be aware of it, but if you have a fancy looking backend, such as a membership system, or mailing system, with lots of images, you are using your own bandwidth when trying to take care of administration details.

9) Syndicate content. Some websites offer for the content to be syndicated. Each time you update your website with new content, other websites that have a certain code on their site, will draw the content changes automatically from your website. This uses bandwidth also.

Data transfer of any kind from yourself, your visitors, and other websites contribute to your bandwidth usage. Most hosts have an area for you to log in and check to see how much you have used in any given month.

Make sure that you know what your host does when you have gone over your bandwidth allotment.

- Does your site disappear until the next month starts? OR do you just accrue overage fees?

- Check to see if your host will warn you right before your account goes over the bandwidth allowance for your package.

- Check to see what the fees are for going over your bandwidth.

Keep track of those bandwidth monsters! And contact me if you need website services. If you are looking for a good website host, go with one I’ve used for many years – click here

Article Copyright © Wendy Shepherd – www.wendyshepherd.com | www.studiomatrix.com