Monthly bandwidth

There are limits on how much data can be sent and received from your sites. This includes FTP and web traffic related to all the sites on your account.

Bandwidth Limits

There are none! Bravenet users have unlimited bandwidth on their sites, within the bounds of our reasonable use guidelines.

Viewing Your Bandwidth Usage

To check your current bandwidth usage:

1. Log in to your Bravenet account.
2. Select the Web Hosting tab.
3. In the Manage Websites area of the page, you can see your total bandwidth usage for the month. There's also a breakdown of your bandwith for each of your websites.

Alternately, you can see your bandwidth usage for each site on the websites tab.

Diagnosing High Bandwidth Usage

If you have much higher bandwidth usage than you expected, it might be due to a number of things.

The first thing you should do is to find out exactly what resource is using all your bandwidth. If If you have a pro site, you should enable website statistics for all your sites. If you have a free site, consider using our hit counter web tool. It isn't as detailed as our pro website statistics, but it will help narrow things down.

• Unexpected popularity of one of your sites
  • With the information from your website statistics or hit counter, you should be able to figure out exactly which website is being hit and where the hits are coming from
  • If the hits are unwanted, you may want to remove the linked site, or redirect traffic to another site.
  • If the hits are wanted, then consider upgrading your bandwidth to deal with the traffic.
  • You could also optimize the busy page so that each hit takes less bandwidth, or add advertising so that the hits generate a bit of revenue for you.

• Images and video from your site is directly used on someone else's site
  • This practice is known as "inline linking" or "hot linking". You can avoid this by adding some rules to your .htaccess file (pro users only). We have the specific instructions here.
  • Free users need not worry - this is automatically blocked for all free accounts.

• Improperly designed web page
  • Some larger website pages can end up transmitting way more information than they need each time they are visited. Consider breaking up your web pages into multiple subpages, with less content on each one. There's some useful tools on our web development resources page to help identify large pages.

• Images, video, or audio are too large
  • Images directly from digital cameras are usually unsuited for web pages - they are much too large and unoptimized. Consider using image software to reduce your image size to something more appropriate for web use.
  • In general, the higher quality the video, picture, or audio, the larger the file will be. If you have media that is being downloaded a lot, consider using more efficient file formats, or reducing the quality of the file.

Discrepancies With Website Statistics

Our website statistics service, included with Pro accounts, will sometimes report slightly different results for your bandwidth usage than the account tab will. This is because of a few factors:

• The websites statistics service does not monitor FTP traffic.
• Different techniques are used to calculate HTTP bandwidth with the different utilities.
• HTTP caches can skew the reporting slightly.

We always go by the information in your account tab when calculating bandwidth usages related to your account, as it gives a more accurate total of your bandwith usage.

Exceeding Your Limits

Bandwidth limits are calculated on a monthly basis. On the 1st of each month, your bandwidth usage will be reset to zero.

When you run out of bandwidth, your site will be temporarily suspended. All visitors to your site will be redirected to a message stating that your site is temporarily offline.

Your site will be automatically reactivated when:

• Your usage is reset on the first of the next month.
• You upgrade your account from Free to Pro (thusly increasing your bandwidth).
• You renew your account with a higher resource package (see below for information on that).

Increasing Your Limits

When upgrading or renewing your account, you can choose to double or triple your resources (monthly bandwidth, disk space, and hosted domains) for the period that you're renewing.

If you want to increase your resources on your existing account, you can still use the renew link on the account tab. This will recalculate your hosting term based off of the value of the time remaining on your current contract and the additional money you will be paying for the renewal term. This total value is then used to calculate a new end to your hosting term, with the appropriate increased limits.

You can also contact our support team through by opening a support ticket, and they can help increase the limits on your account.