Bandwidth refers to the use of resources on a website. It can also be defined as the amount of data that is sent to and from a website over a given period. Specifically, it refers to how many times a resource is called from a server through your website. So anytime a page is called from your website, you are consuming bandwidth. If a script is called upon to process some information, you are consuming more bandwidth. This is because script processing uses more CPU and hard disk power. Whenever a person visits a site to undertake an activity, some computer hardware or software is called upon to do some task.

From this description, it follows that web hosts should charge clients differently according to the amount of resources consumed on a site. For this reason, there is a bandwidth limit for websites on a server. If you exceed the limit, then you ought to pay some extra to compensate for the wear and tear you exert on the hosts’ facilities.

There is a simple way to calculate your bandwidth needs. If a visitor clicks on a 2KB picture, you are using 2KB of bandwidth. Now look at your access logs ( that is, the statistics on your website) to see the total number of pages being viewed in a day and their total size. 1 Gigabyte views a day means 30 gigabytes a month. If your host has allowed only 20 gig, then you can calculate in advance that you need an extra 10 gig so you upgrade your hosting to that amount before you are surprised with a bill.

Given that, it is always advisable to reduce bandwidth as much as possible on your site. Some people resort to a bad practice called bandwidth theft in this regard. Instead of putting large images on their sites, they will rather link to another site. So when visitors click on the image in their site, the picture is actually called from a different site and the second party pays for the bandwidth. Apart from the fact that this practice is unethical, there is a hidden danger of broken hyperlinks. If the image ceases to exist, your link will not work. Also images linked this way, open slow.

There are various way to reduce bandwidth.

Make your files small. If they are images, compress them with a graphics tool. Also avoid video and sound files as these tend to draw a lot of bandwidth. Another way is to split long pages on a site into smaller units to avoid server drag as the page is called from the site. Where possible, use client based scripts to limit server load. A client based script is a program that will do all its processing in the browser instead of the server. A common browser based program is javascript. If you are permitting downloads on your site, make sure that your files are zipped to make them small.
Remember that , there is a limit to which you can economize on bandwidth. Low bandwidth means, slow access to your website. You don’t want visitors to waste a lot of time in obtaining information from your website. Do you?

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