Monthly bandwidth: Difference between revisions


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* Unexpected popularity of one of your sites
* Unexpected popularity of one of your sites
** If you have a pro site, enable [[website statistics]] for all your sites.  If you have a free site, consider using our [[hit counter]] web tool.  With this information, you should be able to figure out exactly which website is being hit and where the hits are coming from.  If needed, you could also [[#Upgrading Your Bandwidth | upgrade]] your bandwidth to deal with the traffic.
** If you have a pro site, enable [[website statistics]] for all your sites.  If you have a free site, consider using our [[hit counter]] web tool.  With this information, you should be able to figure out exactly which website is being hit and where the hits are coming from.  If needed, you could also [[#Increasing Your Limits | upgrade]] your bandwidth to deal with the traffic.
* Images and video from your site is directly used on someone else's site
* 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 [[blocking inline linking | here]].
** 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 [[blocking inline linking | here]].

Revision as of 09:56, 28 May 2008

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

All users have a limit on bandwidth usages:

  • Free users - 1.5 GB/month
  • Pro users - 600 GB/month
  • Pro, double resources - 1.2 TB/month
  • Pro, triple resources - 1.8 TB/month

Viewing Your Bandwidth Usage

To check your current bandwidth usage:

  1. Log into your Bravenet account.
  2. Select the account tab.
  3. In the Webhosting.png Web Hosting 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:

  • Unexpected popularity of one of your sites
    • If you have a pro site, enable website statistics for all your sites. If you have a free site, consider using our hit counter web tool. With this information, you should be able to figure out exactly which website is being hit and where the hits are coming from. If needed, you could also upgrade your bandwidth to deal with the traffic.
  • 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.
  • 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
    • 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.
  • 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.

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.