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What is Bandwidth and Bandwidth transfer?

Definitions:

• Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted over a network connection over time.
• Also called the data transfer rate, it is usually expressed in bits per second (bps).

Nowadays, it seems like more and more people have started using the Internet for their business. Social and e-commerce sites are also major drivers of increased Internet usage. At the same time, many people are unfamiliar with Bandwidth, even if they own a website.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred simultaneously.

Regarding hosting, bandwidth is the maximum amount of data that can be transferred per month or per period. Data transfer is the amount of data exchanged between your site and your visitor’s browser. For example, if your homepage is one megabyte, each time a visitor opens it, their browser will download one megabyte of data. The data transfer can be estimated from file size and number of visits.

How to keep track of bandwidth transfer

You can see bandwidth usage on your cPanel account

Furthermore, you may receive an email notification if your site exceeds its monthly data transfer limit.

Bandwidth effects on your website

Your website will load more slowly as your account has less bandwidth. No matter how fast the connection types your website visitors have are. You often see pages unavailable on some sites due to the maximum amount of data that can be transferred. In this case, visitors will need to wait for their turn.

Unavailable because Bandwidth Exceeded

First, you will need to determine the required Bandwidth for your website, which can be estimated from your website’s size (or, say, page size) and the number of visitors over the given time frame. It is usually measured every month. The main goal is to ensure that all visitors can access your website without waiting in line or encountering issues.

Furthermore, you can determine the required Bandwidth for your site based on the following:

• Expected number of visitors per month (including unique and repeated)
• Page size
• Anticipated number of page views by visitor

How to review the Bandwidth from your cPanel

1. Using AWSTATS

AWSTATS2. Webalizer stats

3. Usage Stats

What should you do when the bandwidth limit is exceeded?

Well, in this case, you will have two options: either you can upgrade the package and increase it, or you can reduce the size of the content with the following:

• Decrease the amount of data downloaded each time
• Decrease the usage of images
• Reduce the resolution of images
• Use the exact length of the print you need to show on the page
• Split the significant page into multiple pages (you can show different information on different pages, so visitors’ browsers will download only the content they are interested in)
• Remove videos or music used in the background
• Remove or restrict large downloads
• In addition, there can be many others as well

Hotlinking:

Hotlinking is also referred to as bandwidth theft. It means someone shows data on their site directly with links. For example, I have an image on my site: https://freelancer-coder.com/anyimage.png. If someone embeds an image directly on their site, such as <img src=”https://freelancer-coder.com/anyimage.png” alt=”image”/>, it is hotlinking. As a result, whenever a visitor opens that page with an idea, the data will be transferred from my server to render that image. In this case, your data transfer usage will be higher than expected.

Using the .htaccess configuration file, we can prevent hotlinking. In this File, we can write rules to protect any asset usage directly on another site.

The example script to prevent the case I showed earlier can be:

• RewriteEngine On
• RewriteCond % !^$
• RewriteCond % !^http://(www\.)?freelancer-coder.com(/)?.*$     [NC]
• RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg)$ – [NC,F,L]

Finally, please share your thoughts on your experience with your site’s bandwidth limit being exceeded. If you have better suggestions on what to do when the bandwidth limit is exceeded, please share them via comments or connect with me.