27 Sep 5 Ways to avoid bandwidth limit exceeded issue
What is Bandwidth Limit Exceeded?
I have recently received an EDM (Electronic Direct Mailer) from a respectable school which I attend classes from. This monthly newsletter invited me to click on one of the links. However, when I click on the link, it shows me a 509 Error. Monthly bandwidth transfer limit exceeded. Thus I cannot access the page to view what I want to see.
This is not the first time I have encountered this issue. There are many companies who blast out newsletters but they do not check or take the necessary precautions to monitor their bandwidth limit.
Bandwidth is used when end users access the website. Each company has a hosting plan with different amount of bandwidth. Some hosts do not limit the bandwidth per month while some hosts have a hard limit that will cause this Bandwidth Limit Exceeded issue. What it basically means is that the amount of bandwidth that was allocated to your hosting plan has been reached.
To avoid this issue, we recommend to minimise bandwidth usage.
(1) Use a CDN
Content Delivery Networks is a system of distributed servers that speedily delivers web content to a user, based on the geographic location of the user, the origin of he webpage and the content delivery server. Such networks can help to lighten the load on the origin server. Two of the most commonly-used CDN is Amazon AWS and CloudFlare. You can find out more about CDNs here.
(2) Compress your images
Reducing the file size of your images will help reduce the bandwidth usage. You can look for free online tools such as Optimizilla or TinyPNG.
(3) Use Gzip Compression
Gzip compression is a standard practice used to reduce the file size of your files and improve the transfer time of your files. You can easily find out how to enable Gzip for your IIS or Apache server here.
(4) Setup Hotlink Protection
Hotlink Protection is a way to protect your bandwidth by disallowing other domains from linking to your content (images/videos/files) on your server. See how to setup Hotlink Protection here.
(5) Use a web host with no bandwidth limits
When selecting which host provider to use, you can use servers that do not limit your bandwidth. The objective is to allow users to continue to access your site without encounter error page. Note that such host providers might charge additional for bandwidth usage above what is specified for the purchased plan.