One common problem which many website users face is their allocated bandwidth being used up faster than they had thought. Visitors to your site sometimes find that message from your hosting service provider that your site has “exceeded it’s bandwidth usage”, so it won’t display. How can you prevent this?

(Image Courtesy: Flickr, under CC license)

Here are four things that you can do to save heavily on your bandwidth -

1) Preventing bandwidth theft – If you have downloadables on your site, or even images that you host on your site, chances are that someone is linking directly to them so that it is displayed on their website. This type of linking is called “hotlinking”. When someone does this, and your downloadables are quite heavy, users to all these websites will be downloading them at the cost of your own bandwidth. Imagine what would happen if you have a popular image on your website, to which ten or more websites are linking to.

SiteWizard explains one way of using the .htaccess file in your control panel to prevent hotlinking. There is another way of using .htaccess to prevent bandwidth theft, given by Altlabs.  These are a bit technical, but easy to implement; but of course, there are the “copyright protection” ways of telling them not to do it, or informing their hosting provider about it. If it is your own image or file, you own all the rights to it.

2) Using other resources like Flickr or Youtube to host your images or videos – The above was the case where you do not want to share. But if you are ok with people hotlinking to your stuff (believe it or not, used correctly this adds value to your site in many ways), you can save your bandwidth by using other free resources like Flickr or Youtube to host your images and videos. If you have a downloadable file, you can either host them on filesharing hosts like Rapidshare.com or Megaupload.com – but you would be better off paying a bit more and going for a good web host who provides you with unlimited bandwidth. I’m quite happy with my webhost.

3) Use compression – Images – especially heavy bitmap (BMP) – can be compressed using Photoshop or GIMP to a JPG or PNG format, which is commonly used by all browsers. These images are highly compressed but still retain the highest amount of quality for the image. Also, you can compress your CSS and HTML files by using tools like the CSS SuperScrub from isnoop.net, or by enabling and using GZip compression.

4) Cache your RSS feed – If you give direct access to your RSS feed, and you have many subscribers, each request for content sent by the RSS feed reader would eat up your bandwidth – slowly, but surely. You can use a tool like RSSCache – here’s a link which explains how to cache your RSS feeds.  If you are hungry for more on this, here are 8 other ways to save your bandwidth on RSS feeds.

Or, you can use a popular option such as Feedburner to serve your RSS feeds to end users – which comes in with a variety of tools as well to publicize and monetize your feeds.