Hosting Hints
If you have just received an invoice for excess bandwidth or disk space and would like to know some ways to reduce this bill, here are our top 6 tips:
1. Images use up a lot of disk space and bandwidth, particularly uncompressed images. Make sure all your images are the smallest file size possible. Each time a visitor to your website views an image, they are actually downloading it, which increases your bandwidth by the size of that image.
2. Remove any music playing in the background - this can use a lot of bandwidth
3. Don't allow videos to automatically start playing when a visitor opens the page (unless they are YouTube videos), as this will use a lot of bandwidth on people who may not even want to watch them! Videos that are hosted by your website can also use a lot of bandwidth, if your site has a lot of visitors. If your videos are hosted on YouTube, but embedded into your site, you don't need to worry because YouTube is covering most of the bandwidth!
4. Ensure you haven't set up any external website monitoring tools - these automatically access your site regularly, and have the potential to cause your bandwidth to skyrocket.
5. Ask us about your website log files. As your website operates, it generates log files which contain information about visitors to your website. The more popular your website is, the larger these files will be. These log files are kept for security purposes and are stored for 120 days by default. The space required for them is included in your disk space allocation. If you would like to keep log files for a shorter period of time to save disk space, please contact us.
6. Ask about our site compression services. If you suspect you may have large photos or files but don't have time to search through your site and would like Datasearch to do this for you, please let us know. This service is charged by the hour, with an estimate given up front. (This service is usually only necessary if you have a full content management system website, as Datasearch will only ever add optimized images to your site.)
Monitoring your bandwidth usage through SmarterStats
If you wish to see a graph of your bandwidth usage, log in to your SmarterStats account using the details provided to you when your site went live, then in the Traffic folder, click on 'Monthly totals'. You may wish to change the date range being displayed by clicking on 'show date ranges' on the right side of your screen. You will then need to enter the start and finish date of the data you wish to display, and click 'get report'.