Bandwidth Limits and What Blows Them

What bandwidth actually measures

Every time somebody loads a page, the server sends them the files that page needs, and the total of everything sent over a month is your bandwidth usage.

Which means it is driven by file size multiplied by requests, not by visitor count.

A thousand visitors to a light page uses less than fifty visitors to a page with an uncompressed video on it.

That is why a bandwidth warning is almost never about popularity, and why the reflex to assume a traffic spike is usually wrong.

The four things that cause it

• One heavy file being downloaded repeatedly.
• Automated traffic: crawlers, scanners, scrapers.
• Hotlinking: another site using your images directly.
• Something looping, such as a broken script or a bad redirect.

Genuine visitors are a distant fifth for almost every small business, which is worth knowing before you start restricting anything visitors do.

The heavy file

The most common cause and the easiest to fix.

A video uploaded directly to the server rather than to a video platform. A brochure at print resolution. A photograph straight from a camera at ten megabytes, used as a page banner.

Each of those is sent in full to every visitor who reaches that page, and a single one can account for most of a month's usage.

The fixes are ordinary: host video on a platform built for it and embed the player, compress images to a sensible size, and offer large documents at a reduced size with the full version on request.

That also makes the site faster, which is a better reason to do it than the bandwidth.

Automated traffic

The cause people do not expect, and it is frequently the largest single share.

Search engine crawlers are legitimate and modest. What is not modest is the volume of scanners looking for vulnerabilities, scrapers copying content, and badly written tools requesting the same pages repeatedly.

On a small site that traffic can exceed human visitors by a wide margin, and it consumes bandwidth exactly as a person would.

Your host's statistics usually separate this, and if they do not, a look at the raw access log will show it plainly: the same address requesting hundreds of pages in a few minutes.

Most of it can be reduced at the server or through a service in front of the site, and it is worth asking your host what they already filter.

Hotlinking

The one that feels unfair, because somebody else is spending your allowance.

Another site links directly to an image on your server rather than copying it, so every visitor to their page causes your server to send the file.

A popular page elsewhere using one of your photographs can consume a substantial amount, and you receive nothing for it.

Most hosting panels include a hotlink protection setting that blocks this, and enabling it takes a minute.

Consider allowing it for a few legitimate cases, such as your own other domains, and be aware that blocking it can break images in places you had forgotten about.

A worked example

A business exceeded their allowance in a month where traffic had not changed and received an overage charge.

The usage breakdown showed a single file responsible for most of it: a promotional video uploaded to the server the previous year and embedded on the homepage, about two hundred megabytes, sent in full to every visitor.

The second largest item was a folder of product photographs being hotlinked by a marketplace listing somebody had created.

They moved the video to a video platform, which cost nothing, and enabled hotlink protection.

Usage fell to under a fifth of the allowance, and the homepage load time improved substantially, which they had not been trying to fix.

Read the statistics before acting

The step that turns guesswork into a fix.

Hosting panels include usage statistics showing the largest files requested, the busiest days, and frequently the sources of traffic.

Look at the top files by transfer rather than the top pages by visit, since those are different lists and the first is the one that explains the bill.

Check whether the usage is steady or arrived in one or two days, which distinguishes a persistent cause from an event.

And compare against previous months, since a limit reached gradually over a year is a different problem from one reached in a week.

What the limit actually means

Worth understanding, because the consequences differ by host and are rarely read in advance.

Some hosts charge for overage, some throttle the site, and some suspend the account until the next month, which is by far the worst outcome.

Check which yours does before you are near a limit rather than after, since the response differs: an overage charge can be absorbed, and a suspension needs preventing.

Unlimited plans generally are not, and carry a fair use provision that is enforced by conversation rather than by a number.

Knowing which arrangement you have takes one look at the terms and changes how urgently any of this needs handling.

The counter-case

Sometimes the traffic is real and the answer is a bigger plan.

A business whose site is genuinely popular, or which distributes files legitimately, has outgrown its allowance rather than developed a problem, and restricting things to stay within it is the wrong direction.

Bandwidth is also inexpensive at the scale most small businesses operate, so a plan upgrade frequently costs less than an afternoon spent optimising.

And blocking automated traffic too aggressively can exclude legitimate crawlers, which affects how you appear in search, so it is worth being specific rather than broad.

Find the cause first. If it is waste, fix it. If it is genuine use, buy more.

The check

1. Look at top files by transfer, not top pages by visit.
2. Check whether usage was steady or arrived in days.
3. Move video to a platform built for it.
4. Compress anything large being served directly.
5. Look for automated traffic in the logs.
6. Enable hotlink protection.
7. Find out what your host does when a limit is reached.

Step one answers this in about two minutes and is a different list from the one most people look at.

Serving files from elsewhere is covered in a CDN for a business in one city.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.