How to SAVE Bandwidth ?

[sysadmin]

How to SAVE Bandwidth ? Everyone wants to save bandwidth, but what is it & how to save it ? We'll be taking a small crash course here on conserving it..

In computer networking, the term "Bandwidth" is often used as a synonym for data transfer rate or in simple words, the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period (usually a second). This kind of bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second (bps). Occasionally, it's expressed as bytes per second (Bps), Kilobytes per second (KBps) or Megabytes per second (MBps).

Bandwidth is what it is all about Hosting accounts have a specific limit of bandwidth allocated to their websites. This limit is usually setup to reset at the end of every month, but there's always a worry of running out of this allocated limit. You know that you have enough to get your visitors what they need with sufficient overhead ? Too much throttling would be a waste but too little throttling or overhead will make the allocated limit to get exceed & eventually the site be taken offline or losing visitors due to slower speeds in browsing the site. So how to determine how much bandwidth will you be using within that limited period? What can be done to save or conserve bandwidth ?

Here are few methods of saving the bandwidth allocated for your site/account in a very simple manner...

Disable Hot Linking: Hot Linking term is linking images or downloads from your website to other website(s).. Basically the images are on your website and other websites just links image tags to your website, hence stealing your bandwidth.. Anyone having a hosting package, needs to have a control panel for hosting management. Using the control panel you can disable such image linking, which would definitely contribute in saving a lot of bandwidth

Website Caching: Enable caching on your website if its not dynamic. Caching will allow the end users computer to read from your server once in a while, the rest of the times it will read from its own backup copies until they expire.

Optimizing: More than half of the bandwidth on most websites is used by images. Optimize your images for the internet and shrink their sizes as well, never use bitmap files (.bmp) as they are HUGE (mostly in MBs). You should use jpeg (.jpg) or gif (.gif) files for images as these are optimized for the internet. There are various image conversion programs/softwares available all over the internet and there are various optimization programs too, be sure to get an optimization program that will be able to retain the images quality while drastically reducing its size... Websites that have large images, videos, MP3's, and large files will use a lot of bandwidth. Some websites may need these but if you are sure your website doesn't need them then don't use them.

Using Authentication/Validation: If you run any forums or submission scripts on your website make sure that they are secured ie: require a validation/authentication code for submission or login. This will reduce the possibilities of people making bots to spam your website and will definitely reduce bandwidth usage.

Bots: It will save a lot of bandwidth by limiting robot scanning. It can help greatly by limiting certain bots, these include Google Bots, MSN Bots, and Yahoo alike. All you have to do is create a robots.txt and tell the bots what to and what not to index. You can also do this with .htaccess if you are experienced enough with it Analyze visitor logs for your website, if you notice any suspicious activity of what you may believe to be a bandwidth hog, you can block such users/IPs from accessing your website via .htaccess or cPanel.

Emails: You'd use IMAP to read emails online instead of using POP3. IMAP only downloads the headers of the mails leaving the main message body on the server, while POP3 downloads complete emails including the body & the images on the local machine consuming major portion of the allocated bandwidth. You can also setup your email client to "NOT TO DISPLAY" the images within the emails. Configuring the antispam filters on the email accounts, would also help saving the unnecessary bandwidth being used up while mail transactions.

Taking the measures mentioned in the above methods will definitely help you to save bandwidth but will not ensure you not to go over the specific allocated limit. If you have a popular website or a lot of visitors, be equipped with a lot of bandwidth. It'd be a good practice to have 15% to 20% extra overhead on your bandwidth. You can calculate used bandwidth by how many hits you will be expecting by the average size of all of your files..

If you've adhered to the above mentioned measure, Congrats, you're on the way to save a lot of bandwidth.. Enjoy