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Free Website Hosting - Bandwidth Allocation
Q: What does bandwidth refer to?
A: The term Bandwidth refers to how much data is sent from our servers (where your website is located)
to your visitors web browsers. For example, in the Free Website Hosting service we allow your account to transfer
500 MB of data from your website to your visitors browsers each month.
Data refers to all of the files on your website... images, webpages, java applet files, everything. Every file on your website has a specific filesize. Let's say you have a webpage with a filesize of 12kb, and you have 3 images on that page which each have a filesize of 20kb (3x20kb = 60kb) and a midi sound file, that plays automatically on your page, with a filesize of 28kb, that is a total of 100kb transferred to your visitors browser when they load your page. When that 100kb page is loaded 10 times into visitors browsers, that uses up 1,000kb (10x100kb = 1,000kb) or 1MB of bandwidth. Everything that is transferred contributes to your bandwidth usage. Q: What happens when I run out of available bandwidth?
A: Free Website Hosting accounts are 'metered' and when your daily bandwidth allotment has been exceeded we turn off access to your website. Your site will be restored the next day with a fresh new bandwidth allotment for the day. Unfortunately, this is a necessary step to ensure that all site accounts run as fast and reliably as they can.
Q: What can I do to make my bandwidth last longer?
A: The biggest culprit as far as bandwidth goes, is large images and files made available for download. Images with a large filesize (like images pulled from digital cameras and web-cams) take up a lot of a sites bandwidth allotment. The average un-optimized .jpg photo image can be as large as 6MB. Thats 6MB of bandwidth for one download to one visitor... you would very quickly run out of bandwidth for the day.
Make sure all of your images are optimized in a graphics optimization program like Webrazor Pro or Paint Shop Pro. These will save your photo images at a much smaller filesize. Don't offer downloads, or make sure the files you are making available are very small. Use a compression tool like Winzip to compress and shrink your files into one small .zip file. Q: How can I get more bandwidth for my site?
A: Extra bandwidth cannot be purchased for the Free Website Hosting service. Upgrade your website to one of our Paid Website Hosting packages. Our Basic Package provides up to 10GB (10,000MB) of monthly bandwidth, and our Pro hosting package allows for 30GB (30,000MB) of monthly bandwidth.
Click here to view our Paid Web Site Hosting Packages |
