Monthly Bandwidth is measured in megabytes of traffic to and from the website. This includes downloads to visitors’ computers (page views), uploads to the website, emails and attachments.

The size of images is often the cause of excessive bandwidth. Resize images to suit their size on a web page. Compress the images by a ratio that does not change the quality seen by the human eye on a web page. See how at www.platywebs.com.au/hosting-tips/optimise-images

You need to load images that fit the space you allow for them. Of course you can code the image size to show smaller than the actual image, but the actual image will still be counted in the bandwidth usage.

A further problem is that the larger image takes longer to load – annoying for a visitor. Ask us about a graphics program which resizes and compresses images.

If the traffic has suddenly jumped compared to previous months, check the number of visits at the top of the statistics of countries which visited you (in Metrics: Awstats). Australia normally should be at the top of the list. If you are getting a lot of visits from elsewhere they could be hackers. The total number of visits should be not much more than the number of unique visitors. If there are a lot more, then it would be from hackers trying to guess your password.

Only a small difference will be from genuine visitors returning to your website in the same 24 hour period.

We allow unlimited bandwidth for all our Linux web hosting plans.

But savings in bandwidth by optimising your images before uploading them to your website will mean your website loads faster.