As part of your package you get an allocated amount of bandwidth available to you for your website (see our feature list for a breakdown of the bandwidth allocations on each subscription level), we believe that the bandwidth allocations are quite generous and most of the time you will only go over these allocations if you have a high number of visitors to your site or the files that you are delivering to your visitors are too large.
Each time a file is loaded into a browser then it uses bandwidth in relation to the size of the file being delivered, this also includes the usage of your admin area, so any files you are importing or exporting to your file manager will also use up bandwidth.
If you have an external security scanner such as McAfee Web Security, Trustwave or Security Metrics scanning your site then this can also force your bandwidth to jump up while the scan is running.
The most common cause of the bandwidth being overly high is because the images that are being used within the website are just too big. If you have taken a picture with your camera and upload it straight to your website without resizing or compressing the image then you will find that each time this file is loaded into the browser by your visitors then a huge chunk of your bandwidth can be taken up.
The best way to avoid your images being too large is to make sure that the images you are uploading have already been resized and compressed before uploading them to your file manager. This can be accomplished by using a piece of photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. If the image you want to display on the website will only take up an area 200 pixels by 200 pixels then make sure that this is the size you are actually uploading rather than using a file 1000 pixels wide and resizing it in the WYSIWYG editor.
If you are uploading an image for a product then unless you need people to be able to really zoom in on an image then we would recommend an image size no larger than 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, this should be adequate size for most product images for the visitor to have a good view of what it is that they will be receiving.
If you have already uploaded your image to the file manager then you can resize and compress the image at the same time within the file manager itself. You can do this by clicking on the resize option to the right of the image. Once you click this option another window will appear allowing you to enter your required dimension for the image, you can just type in your required size and click resize. However if the file is already the correct size, clicking resize should compress the file without resizing it.
Please note that once a file has been compressed then trying to compress it further will probably not result in any reduction in file size.
If you are still getting overly high bandwidth issues after addressing the above issues then please contact us for further assistance.
