Hi everyone, this week I’d like to clarify what the bandwidth allowance on hosting packages is. Most of Hosting Australia’s hosting package has infinite bandwidth allowances, with a few exceptions. This means that you pretty much don’t have to worry about exceeding this limit at all. Before we get into that we’ll quickly go over counts as bandwidth usage. We do enforce a high end limit, to prevent malicious use of Bandwidth, but this should not effect legitimate use of bandwidth on your site.
The first and most well-known way of using up your bandwidth is http traffic. Simply put this is people visiting and using your website, the more visitors you have the more bandwidth you will use up. One of the more common reasons we see our clients use up their bandwidth occurs when a special event or sale is held on their website and they receive more visitors to their site than usual. Obviously, it could be disastrous for a site to go down right in the middle of a big sale, so what we recommend to anyone before holding an event like this would be to contact us and discuss further.
One way of using up bandwidth that is less widely known Is through outgoing mail, Pop3 and IMAP traffic can quickly exceed your bandwidth limits if you’re not careful sending out lots of emails. Compromised email accounts can also be your worst enemy here as even one account sending out spam can max your bandwidth before you can blink. The easiest way to avoid this is to update your password regularly and to follow the general rules to creating secure passwords.
The last one is FTP, AKA File Transfer Protocol. FTP is a service for transferring data and files across the internet, you may upload and download whatever you want using certain applications and software. However once again if you’re not careful of the size or the amount of content you’re uploading you could be maxing your bandwidth again. If you know you’re going to doing a large FTP transfer that could put you in the red for your bandwidth give us a heads up and we can increase your limit temporarily.
Bandwidth is easy to manage if you know what not to do, it’s rare to max it out but if you do happen to reach the ceiling limit at a bad time then you could find yourself without website and emails in times of need.
If you had any trouble with any of the terms in this article you can visit Hosting-Australia’sglossary of terms.
