By Herman Drost

You just received a higher than normal monthly bill on your credit card for web hosting. Your hosting company explains that you exceeded your monthly minimum for "bandwidth usage" and suggests reducing the size of your web site files.

What is bandwidth usage? What does bandwidth mean? How much bandwidth do you need? How can you reduce bandwidth usage?

Let's discuss each of these topics in more depth.

What is "bandwidth usage?" This refers to the total amount of information that has been served to your web site visitors each month. Every file on your Web Site has a specific size (e.g. 22K). Every time a visitor downloads that file, your bandwidth usage goes up by that amount.

The larger the file, the higher the bandwidth usage when it is downloaded. The more traffic to your site, the more bandwidth you will use.

What does "bandwidth" mean? Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The "data transfer rate" is the speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and Mbps, respectively.

Bits and Bytes 8 bits = 1 byte. 1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (Kb). 1,024 kilobytes (Kb) = 1 megabyte (mb or meg) 1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (gb or gig)

How much bandwidth do I need? To determine how much bandwidth you need, estimate the file size of each web page, and then multiply it by the number of pages on your web site.

Multiply this figure by the number of the number of page views you expect per month from your site.

For example, if your web page consists of two 15Kb images and 3Kb of html, you would have 33Kb of data for that page. Now multiply this by the number of page views you expect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). This would mean 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per month for that page.

Now recalculate this number for each page, and you'll know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.

How can you reduce bandwidth usage? The easy way is to reduce the size of the files on your site, particularly images and other graphics. For example, you have a large image (i.e. 200KB) on your web page that is downloaded by each visitor every time the page is requested. If you reduce this image to 20KB or remove it altogether, it will dramatically cut your bandwidth usage. It will also speed up your site's performance.

For more information on optimizing images for the Web, read my article, "Preparing Images for Your Web Site", (www.isitebuild.com/imageoptimization2).

Web Sites that have MP3s to download, movies, music playing in the background and large images, will obviously have a higher bandwidth. Large web sites or sites that expect a lot of traffic, will also use a lot.

If your site has mainly html pages and small images, your bandwidth will not be that high.

Bandwidth Tools Monitoring bandwidth http://www.utoronto.ca/ucres/netup.htm

Web Page Checker http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/page_size.cgi

Tuning up your Web Site http://websitegarage.netscape.com/

Bandwidth Tips If you make changes to your site by adding more files and/or web pages, recalculate your web site file size.

Estimate how many visitors will be accessing your web pages over the next few months.

Recalculate the bandwidth usage for your site. You may need more web space and bandwidth for your site to function effectively.

Check with your web hosting company to upgrade your hosting plan.

Conclusion Now you can avoid the shock of exceeding your monthly bandwidth usage and paying higher hosting fees. You are now ready to receive more traffic to your site and therefore make more sales.

So, you have your domain name and you have designed a website or had a website built for you, now what. Well, of course you need hosting. A lot of people want to start a business online but are not aware of some of the basics like how people are able to view or visit your website.

What is web hosting? Right now, if you have already built your website, all of those files are on your computer. People who are surfing the web don't have access to your computer, therefore cannot find your website. Advanced users know they can turn their computer into a server where people are actually coming to their computer to view their website, however, this is not recommended and certainly not recommended for someone who is not very advanced as a computer technician.

There are computers who are set up to be servers. These are called host computers as well to simplify things. You need to upload your website files to the hosting computer so they can make it available for others to view on the web. This is the service we call web hosting.

Will just any web host do? No. This is a common misunderstanding about web hosting. All web hosts are not created equal. There are many different levels of web hosting and many different plans and packages to consider. There are also many other things you have to consider when choosing a web hosting company. Let's go over one of the most important issues when choosing a web hosting plan to help you understand better.

images? Will it have movies? Music downloads? Software or other downloads? Or is it a very simple and compact website that is mostly text? Do you expect a lot of traffic to your website?

The reason for all those questions is something called bandwidth or transfer. The amount of storage space a web-hosting plan offers you is usually far less important than the amount of transfer or bandwidth the web host offers you.

Every time someone visits your webpage, every file included in that webpage is downloaded from your website to their computer. In other words, from the web host's computer to the visitor computer. This includes each graphic or image on the page, every icon, even the html page itself is downloaded by a user just visiting your webpage. The size of each of those files being transferred to the visitors computer is the amount of transfer orbandwidth you are using.

Let's say you get 100 visitors per day to your website. Let's also say that your html page is around 15k and you have 5 images on that webpage that altogether are around 50k. That means each visitor to your website is using up 65k in bandwidth every time they visit that page. Let's also say your average visitor opens 3 pages within your website and those pages are the same size as your main page. That means each visitor uses 195k minimum and that is if they don't keep going back to your main page.

Multiply that 195k times the 100 visitors per day you get and you are using 19,500k or a little over 19 megabytes of transfer per day. Multiply that by 30 days and you get 585,000k or 585 megabytes of transfer or bandwidth used per month.

Now if your web hosting plan allows for more bandwidth than you think you will need, then you know you are okay there. However, make sure you know upfront what the cost of going over your allotted bandwidth is. Some webhosts charge a lot for every megabyte you use over the limit they set for you in the plan you chose. It's a good idea to pick a webhosting plan that is just one step above the one you think you need to allow for growth. You might become very popular like a rock star overnight!

D. David Dugan recommends the web hosting solutions offered by DD&C

By Adam Eisner

When choosing a host, the amount of bandwidth you purchase can be crucial to the success of your site. Generally speaking, the more bandwidth you have, the more traffic your site will be able to handle at one time.

How much bandwidth do I need?

To determine how much bandwidth you'll need, you must first:

• estimate how big each page on your site is, and
• how many people are going to view it.

To do this, add up the size of every image on the page and the size of the page's HTML files. Then multiply this figure by the number of views you expect for that page per month. For example, if you had three 10k images on your page and a 2k HTML file, you would have 32k of data on that page. Multiply that by your expected page views (let's say 100,000 per month), and you get 3.2G of data to be transferred that month for that page. Now recalculate this number for each page, and you'll know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.

How can I save bandwidth?

There are three key ways to optimize your bandwidth usage:
1. Keep your pages as small as possible.
This means tight HTML programming to reduce file size, and compacting your pictures and graphics to reduce image size ( NetMechanic has a free, easy-to-use file compression utility). Use the JPEG image format for your photos and the GIF format for graphics - their compression abilities are second to none.

Dr. HTML's site has useful tools that will analyze your site's image sizes, transfer amounts, table structure and more.

2. Use images that aren't stored on your site.
You can do this by replacing the file name in your tag with a URL that gives the location of the image you want to use. Before doing this, however, make sure you have the permission of the site you are linking to. Otherwise, you're stealing bandwidth, which is considered pirating and is therefore illegal (for more information, see "How can I prevent bandwidth theft?" below).

3. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Another effective way to save bandwidth is to use CSS. Designed to reduce HTML file size, CSS attribute values for any HTML element/command at the beginning of the document, rather than repeating them throughout.

For more information on CSS and other resources related to bandwidth conservation, visit Infohiway or the SitePoint CSS Tutorial.

How can I prevent bandwidth theft?

To use another site's images by linking to them through your tags without permission is a form of double piracy: you're pirating both the site's image and its bandwidth. As unethical as it may be, it's a reality many webmasters have to deal with on a daily basis.

Policing
The most basic method of preventing theft of your bandwidth is policing. Analyze search engines, logs, and other sites to find out who's using your images (and your bandwidth) without permission. Once you've identified the offenders, you can contact them and order them to stop linking to your site (and if they try to feed you a story about everything on the Internet being in the "public domain," don't buy it). Unfortunately, policing sites yourself is a time-consuming task.

Commercial Software
A more costly but time-efficient way to protect your bandwidth is to take advantage of the software packages that are currently available. A standard log analysis program like WebTrends can help track bandwidth thieves, as most software suites like this will identify the most popular referrers and visitors to your site. Armed with that information, you can work backward to find out if any sites are hitching a ride on your connection. Most Web hosts offer some sort of log analysis program as a standard feature of their hosting package.

If you're looking for something a bit more automated, Artistscope offers a number of utilities that can protect your images through encryption, secure Web hosting, and other methods. Protection plans start as low as $US10 per 100 page views.

Or, for an extremely secure, high-end solution, Digimarc has developed patented digital technology that embeds a "watermark" on all files, providing copyright protection and tracking for your electronic property.

Where can I find out more? For further details on bandwidth, take a look at Bandwidth.com, a site that matches users with bandwidth providers. About.com recently launched a bandwidth-specific Web site that's chock-full of bandwidth-related news and information. And be sure to visit MSN's message board community, where you'll find an entire section dedicated to connectivity.