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Updated: 07/12/2021
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In our previous tutorial, we discussed what bandwidth is, how HostArmada treats bandwidth, and we also went over the cPanel tools you can use to check where the generated bandwidth originated from. This tutorial will look at the best practices you can implement for your website to prevent unnecessary bandwidth generation and enjoy a wholesome web hosting experience.
CDN service or Content Delivery Network service became increasingly popular over the past few years because of the features it adds to the domain name using such service. Some of these features include Speed, Security, DDoS Protection, Global Accessibility, Privacy, and much more.
Undoubtedly one of the main advantages of the CDN service is the speed at which the static contents of your websites are being delivered to the visitors. This is achieved thanks to the cached copy of each static resource of such as image, CSS file, or JS file on a special location called “Edge Node” or “POP” (Point of Presence). These locations are strategically placed around the globe just so every visitor of your website can experience equally fast loading speed regardless of where the visitor comes from.
In other words, the CND service is incredibly potent when you host a site that gets a lot of attention from all around the globe. It will make it as fast as if the visitor is in the same country where the website is hosted.
We will not cover the rest of the CDN features here. We have a fantastic blog post that thoroughly covers CDN services, how they work, their benefits, and our newest addition yet - Armada CND!
Now that we explained the basics of how CDN works, it is pretty apparent why implementing such a service will positively affect a customer's bandwidth.
Instead of the user fetching static resources from the webserver and generating additional bandwidth on the web hosting account, they will instead request these resources from the CDN service's PoPs and save up on bandwidth that would typically build upon the web hosting server.
We recommend the following CDN service providers:
Unfortunately, there will be times when implementing a CDN service or caching for your website won't be enough, and the bandwidth will still be very high due to the size and the amount of content displayed on a website.
Often the reason for big in size website pages are lots of high-resolution images and/or videos. The huge auditory that browses such websites combined with the enormous size of the photos/videos is a recipe for massive bandwidth generation each month.
If a client does not have the budget to scale up their web hosting account to meet their website's needs for bandwidth, they need an alternative. That is why we would like to suggest the following services that can be used in order to “offload” the heavy content from your website thus reducing the overall bandwidth usage:
The process of optimizing the images of your website consists of reducing the size of the image using tools for data compression. Data Compression is a technology that lowers the size of a larger file, thus making it smaller, and then deliver it faster to the visitor's web browser for example when accessing a website.
There are numerous ways of using compression for your images, and we have summarized this information in our Eight recommended Image Optimization Tools for 2020 blog post.
If you are using WordPress, we also prepared a blog post that features the best image optimization plugins for WordPress, so you should check it out.
You should not only resort to optimizing your images in the case where the bandwidth is high. It would be best to turn this into a habit whenever uploading pictures, thus ensuring lower bandwidth consumption and faster loading speed.
Every website these days uses JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Without these three building blocks, websites would be only plain text and very dull. Minification is the act of lowering the size of these files by removing any unnecessary whitespaces, tags, or codes from these files. In doing so, the client reduces the size of the files, thus making the webserver deliver them faster to the visitor's browser.
There are various ways of achieving that. For example, if you are using an open-source application for building your website, you should look in the official plugins marketplace for that application as most probably there are some very good minification plugins out there already!
Take for example WordPress. WordPress users are once again highly favored in this regard because they have many plugins out there that can perform the minification process without the need to use Cloudflare. Most caching plugins offer this functionality, and readers should go through our HostArmada Top Choice for WordPress caching plugins for 2020 blog post to learn more.
Hotlinking is the process of directly implementing a piece of media content from one website to another using a URL. At first glance, this does not sound that bad, does it? Well, in reality, the person who links the content on their website using hotlinking will "steal" the other person's bandwidth as it will show up from the original source. Imagine having a photography website with many models posing in different locations all over the globe. Another person has a touring site that features many places from your images, so he decides to use them by linking them to their website using the direct URL. For example:
If the person with the touring website receives many visitors, the bandwidth will count towards awesomephotos.com instead of his website.
You should always implement HotLink protection to prevent such a scenario, especially if you use attractive & original photos. Luckily, there is a very straightforward way to do so by activating HotLink protection. We have a great tutorial on how you can do that with HostArmada here.
There will be times where various user agents will cause high bandwidth usage on your web hosting account. They don't necessarily have to be "bad" bots, but if they aggressively crawl the website daily or even several times per day and the website has many pages, this could prove to be the reason for high bandwidth generation.
To prevent this, we recommend using the robots.txt file of your web hosting account. Basically, it is a regular text file that instructs bots on how to behave when they crawl the site. We have an excellent knowledge base article that explains what robots.txt is and how you can use it correctly here.
An excellent way you can reduce your bandwidth is to lower your website’s homepage size. The website's homepage is by far the most accessed and recognizable area of the site, and keeping it nice and clean will guarantee that even if you get 10 000 hits on it, the bandwidth won't increase drastically.
For example, if you have a blog, you should avoid having lots of posts on your home page. Just keep the most recent ones there and add a widget on either the left and right sides, which showcases your best ones.
We hope that you found the information in this tutorial helpful. We have showcased quite a few methods you can use to lower your hosting account's bandwidth consumption. Note that you can also combine some of the methods to achieve even more outstanding results. Of course, our technical support team is 24/7 available at your disposal, so if you face any difficulties with this, please be sure to contact them about it through your Client Area.
Nikola is an accomplished tech-savvy extraordinaire with over six years of experience in the web hosting field. He started as a customer care representative and quickly rose the ranks to become a support supervisor and, eventually - the head of the technical department in HostArmada. His deep understanding of the client's needs, combined with his technical knowledge, makes him the perfect man to create the ideal harmony between client satisfaction and professional problem-solving. You will often find him creating helpful tutorials, articles, and blog posts that help existing customers get around.
Learn more about Resource Usage in the other tutorials that we have:
