Website Hosting

Bandwidth Allocation

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Free Website Hosting - Bandwidth Allocation



Q: What does bandwidth refer to?

A: The term Bandwidth refers to how much data is sent to and from our servers (where your website is located) to your visitors web browsers. For example, in the Free Website Hosting service we allow your account to transfer 1.5GB (1536 MB) of data from your website to your visitors browsers each month.

Data refers to all of the files on your website... images, webpages, java applet files, everything.

Every file on your website has a specific filesize. Let's say you have a webpage with a filesize of 12kb, and you have 3 images on that page which each have a filesize of 20kb (3x20kb = 60kb) and a midi sound file, that plays automatically on your page, with a filesize of 30.4kb, that is a total of 102.4kb transferred to your visitors browser when they load your page.

When that 102.4 kb page is loaded 10 times into visitor's browsers, that uses up 1,024kb (10x102.4 kb = 1,024kb) or 1MB of bandwidth. Everything that is transferred contributes to your bandwidth usage.

FTP downloads, ftp uploads and uploads done via php scripts get added to your bandwidth usage as well.

Q: What happens when I run out of available bandwidth?

A: Free Website Hosting websites are 'metered' constantly and when you exceed your limit we turn off access to your sites. Your websites will be unavailable until the first day of the following month when a new monthly allotment begins. Unfortunately, this is a necessary step to ensure that all sites run as fast and reliably as they can.

Q: What can I do to make my bandwidth last longer?

A: The biggest culprit as far as bandwidth goes, is large images and files made available for download. Images with a large filesize (like images pulled from digital cameras and web-cams) take up a lot of a sites bandwidth allotment. The average un-optimized .jpg photo image can be as large as 6MB. Thats 6MB of bandwidth for one download to one visitor... you would very quickly run out of bandwidth for the month.

Make sure all of your images are optimized in a graphics optimization program like Webrazor Pro or Paint Shop Pro. These will save your photo images at a much smaller filesize.

Don't offer downloads, or make sure the files you are making available are very small. Use a compression tool like Winzip to compress and shrink your files into one small .zip file.

Q: How can I get more bandwidth for my site?

A: Extra bandwidth cannot be purchased for the Free Website Hosting service. Upgrade your website to our Premium Hosting package for unbeatable bandwidth limits!

Your free websites will be reactivated immediately after upgrading.

Click here to view our Premium Hosting Packages »