How to Limit Bandwidth Usage – Since I recently upgraded to a dedicated server, one of my main objectives was to limit my bandwidth usage especially since it’s no longer a shared server and I don’t want any of my sites to load extra slow. There are quite a few ways in which you can limit your bandwidth and I’m still working on a few myself!
Don’t Host Images… Or At Least Minimize Or Outsource
A large portion of your bandwidth usage comes from hosting images on your server. The logical thing for people to do is to simply avoid hosting images on their own server but not all of us can do that. Or at least, I know I don’t want to.
There are quite a few places in which you can outsource your image hosting. A few places include Imageshack, Flickr, Photobucket, etc. Though, some of these sites give you a limit on the bandwidth usage you can use and some of these places charge a small fee.
In my experience, the larger (or the more images) you have hosted, the slower your site gets and the more bandwidth it uses. If it is completely necessary for you to use images and you don’t want to outsource, I would simply put small images, if you can.
HTTP Compression
I’m finding out more and more with this upgrade to a dedicated server and HTTP compression is something that will be extremely helpful. Basically, what it does it compress your content so your site can load faster. Just think about it like it’s a zip file for your website.
By doing the HTTP compression, you can actually save up to 75 percent on your html page size. Again, this helps extremely well with load speed for your content. I’m actually still trying to work this portion out on my websites.
If you want to check your website and see how much space you can save, go to this HTTP compression checker and just type in your URL and it’ll tell you how much space you can save, if its uncompressed or not, etc. And don’t worry, it’s free to check and you don’t have to sign up for anything.
Prevent Hotlinking
Yes, I have definitely done my research because now I have to take things more seriously since my upgrade. One of the things that can actually increase your bandwidth is letting people directly link to your images and content. Well, particularly your images since that takes up most of your bandwidth usage.
When people link directly to your image that’s hosted on your website, it’s known as “hotlinking”. Basically, they are stealing your bandwidth from your hosted images. So, say 100 people decide to hotlink to your image and they get lots of traffic, your bandwidth is going to spike very high.
There’s a way to put a coding in so people can’t do this. I’m actually in the middle of trying to figure this out so I’ll try to update you guys with how to do it once I do it correctly.
There are more ways to limit your bandwidth usage but here are just a few that are pretty important. I figured I would share this with you guys but we all want to keep our spikes in bandwidth low, right? 
I tend to host Images myself. As I am a small blog, I had no problem at all but looks like I should try the Prevent Hotlinking Feature.
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Great tips as always! I too just moved to a dedicated server & am wondering if I should use my old hosting company for new stories with images/videos. Also just checked the HTTP Compression & look more into that. Hotlinking is always a problem, so curious about the code, but sometimes I don’t even know they’re hotlinking. Thanks again for the wonderful tips!!!
I know that what I’m going to mention has not to do with bandwidth but another good way to optimize our brand new dedicated (or any) server is to use XML instead of SQL Databases.
Images outsourcing is probably the best way to avoid high bandwidth usage. Just think that every image is 100kb and for every hundred visitors we have to spend 10mb for that image.
Open a file in notepad. Type the following
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)? YourSite\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ – [F]
Save the file as .htaccess and upload it in your images folder. It’ll stop hotlinking.
Abby – Maybe we can work together on dedicated server things since I’m assuming we’re both brand new to it.
Pet Care – I thought it was required to use SQL DB if you’re using WP?
Tanmay – Is that strictly for WP or you just upload it into any image folder you don’t want people to hotlink from?
And thanks for the coding btw!
Jay
Can ISPs charge you for going over the bandwidth limit if they give you no tools to watch your own usage?
Don’t think so.
It is a perl script that runs in background and creates graphics for download/upload speed, CPU temperature, HDD space, CPU load etc.
Yep, you need SQL if you are using WP. Also I must admit that WP is the most powerful CMS. It’s only worthy to use XML if you program your own framework… knowing exactly what you need. Besides… XML uses bandwidth and that is precisely what this post is about. SQL only uses memory and server load, not bw, so you are fine with WP when bandwidth is the issue. Images is the key, I always say that to my pals.
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so this is why im having with the loading time of my blog. because of the images that I am uploading. I have to run through them and delete those images that I am not using anymore.
Thanks for this one.
I think, this article can help me to manage my bandwidth speed.
Also having image widths and heights that fit with our post body is a good idea. It’d make no sense having a 1024×768 image reduced on a 480px theme. And that works not only if we host the images on our own servers but also to control the bandwidth limit that photobucket or imageshack provide.
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