Determine Your Free Web Hosting Bandwidth Needs
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea
What Bandwidth Means to Free Web Hosting
Free web hosting companies have specific limitations and allocations on the use of bandwidth when you host your web site. To find out what this means to you and your web site, you must first understand what is meant by bandwidth.
The term Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that is sent and retrieved from any one source to another source across the Internet. Bandwidth is the common term used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and Web Site Hosting Providers to track and limit this data that is transferred by visitors and users when you are using the services they provide.
Determining Your Bandwidth Needs for Free Web Hosting
Free web hosting generally provides smaller amounts of bandwidth for the free web sites that are hosted on their servers than a paid hosting company allows. This limited bandwidth makes it important to understand and be able to calculate the amount of bandwidth your web site uses. Every file on your web site has a specific file size including graphics, music, etc., and your overall bandwidth is affected by these files.
For example, you have a web page that indicates a file size of 12kb. You have 3 images linked to that page, each image has a file size of 20kb. That would add an additional 60kb to your page size. Maybe you also have a sound file that plays automatically on your page. The sound file size is 28kb. Your web page total would be 100kb of bandwidth transferred to your visitor's browser when they load your web page. After your web page has been loaded 10 times into a visitor's browser, 1,000kb or 1MB of your allocated bandwidth will be used.
Many free web hosting providers also include files that you transfer to and from your web site using FTP or their file management system in your total bandwidth allotment. Making small changes to your web site will not generally cause a huge increase in your bandwidth. If you frequently change large files on your web site such as large graphics, music, movies, software downloads, e-books, etc., these may show a significant increase in the bandwidth you have used.
Lowering Your Bandwidth Usage for Free Web Hosting
Personal web sites quite often include large images, movies, music and software files. These are the largest contributors to your bandwidth usage besides having lots of visitors. Try to limit the use of these types of files if possible. Try to compress your images and your HTML files to their smallest possible size. This can be done either offline with special software packages or online with one of the free service providers that are available.
Although bandwidth allocations are increasing and extra bandwidth prices are dropping, the average file size on free web hosting is increasing.
The key to avoiding additional costs is optimizing all of your graphics (which can be done without deterring from the quality) and compress of your HTML files.
