Web Hosting Data & Bandwidth Considerations

Photo by sammix2008

In part 1 we considered two free programs you can use for monitoring and measuring the traffic to your website.  One of my readers suggested a third program, Gostats which I’m still checking out.  In this follow up article, I want to go through another aspect of this subject, which I had n’t thought about until it became a problem for me.

Last week, I got an email from my Web Hosting provider which read:

“The domain technicalarticles.co.uk has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit (2707.29/3000.00 Megs).   Do not respond to this message. Your reply will go nowhere. !!!!”

This was a bit ominous and caused some alarm bells to ring, and I was in a bit of a panic for a few days.  Let’s just go through what happened and how I got to the bottom of this little episode.

Web Hosting Packages

When I got the email, my first thought was that my new Videodippers site was taking up too much space.  Since buying the web space, I’d bought a lot of domain names and tried to build different sites, but the only ones that were really active were the Technical Articles & the Videodippers sites.  So I started to delete some of my inactive sites using my ftp program.  Since launching my Videodippers site, I’d been adding videos to the site furiously, and my second thought was that this was the problem.  But when I checked my actual space useage, it was only around 13Mega bytes for the Videodippers directory.

At first though, using the Filezilla ftp package, I found it difficult to get a good view of what my actual useage was.  So I went to my CPANEL interface provided by the Webhosting provider, and in there was a utility called Disk Space Useage, which gave a neat graphical display of this as you can see below.

Public_html is where all your web site folders are stored, this is where all your files (websites, templates, articles, images etc.,) are kept.  The tmp directory is used by the various stats programs provided by your web hosting provider to give you monitoring information (eg. Webalizer, Analog Stats).  So my Webhost was telling me I was only using 67.39 Megabytes in total.  Now when I bought the package I knew I had 200Megabytes of Data space, so this was no where near 80% utilisation.  After a bit more digging, I learnt that when you buy a Web Hosting package, you also get another fixed parameter with the package which is called the Bandwidth.  This was where my problem lay.

Understanding Your Bandwidth Limitation

My web hosting package came with the following options:

WEB SPACE ……………………..   200MB
MONTHLY BANDWIDTH……….. 3000MB

Bandwidth is the amount of traffic your site is generating or using on the Web Host.  What this means is that the more popular your site grows, the more bandwidth your site uses.  Like with everything else in life, nothing comes for free.  So, more bandwidth equals more money.  Now where was the culprit, what caused this.

These were the stats for my two sites:

Technical Articles     Videodippers

December 2008………………  511.23Mb                       1.28Gb
January 2009………………….  354.4Mb                         2.11Gb

The traffic to Videodippers had almost doubled.  So my efforts on adding more videos was paying off, and the popularity of some of my videos had increased the traffic to my site.   So, by trying to make my site popular, although I was not getting any richer, I have to now fund the sites success by moving my hosting package up from Basic to Premium.  The premium package gives me 1000Mb storage and 10Gb of bandwidth, more than 3 times what I have now.

Conclusions

I guess the lesson to learn is just be aware of this issue, as traffic to your site grows, you will come across this problem and you will need to increase your bandwidth appropriately.  This is a good state of affairs, something we are all striving to do in one way or another.  We all want increased traffic, that’s the business we’re in.  The more traffic we get, the more options open up to us for monetizing our web-sites and making it more attractive for advertisers.  So when this happens, welcome it, because you’re headed in the right direction.

Good luck!

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technicalarticles.co.uk features regular articles on my blogging journey of creating a unique web presence and sharing with my readers ideas and tips for helping them do the same. Keep up to date with the latest posts from Daniel Hunt - Join the Community by Subscribing.