What To Do When Your Website Runs Out Of Bandwidth...

May 3
05:56

2015

Alex HD

Alex HD

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Have you come across a website which welcomes you with a "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" Page? To know why your bandwidth limit was reached, read our other article. This article explains what you can do when your website Bandwidth limit is exceeded.

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Have you come across a website which welcomes you with a "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" Page? Was it your own website? Most people encounter this issue towards the end of the month. This means that the data transfer limit which was set by your web host has been exhausted. To know why your bandwidth limit was reached,What To Do When Your Website Runs Out Of Bandwidth... Articles read our other article. This article explains what you can do when your website Bandwidth limit is exceeded.

Plan in advance

Find out how much data transfer your website takes up every month on an average. If your website exceeds 80% of the allotted bandwidth, continuously for a couple of months, you should contact your web host and get it upgraded at the earliest. Plan for some buffer limit, which will allow you to accommodate a sudden spike in traffic due to popularity or an attack on your account. Monitoring your hosting account and setting up email alerts for bandwidth limits is a good idea, if you want to be sure your website will not be affected. If you are unsure of a bandwidth requirement for an addon to your main website, like a web app or mobile app, consider shifting it to a separate hosting account so that it does not interfere with your main websites bandwidth usage.

Upgrade

If you need immediate access to your website, you should consider purchasing an upgraded plan or asking your web host if they have any upgrade plans available. An upgrade is usually activated instantly upon payment and your website will return to normal immediately. This will prevent your visitors from seeing an error page and will allow you to restore normalcy to all your web services in that account.

Wait it out

Most Data Transfer limits are based upon a monthly cycle. This means that at the start of the next month, your limit is reset to zero and your bandwidth is calculated all over again. This means that if you just wait it out till the next month or next cycle, your website will be back to normal. This option costs no money but will definitely dent your websites search rankings and visibility. No customer wants to be greeted by an error page when they want to trade with you.

Plan for the future

Planning how much bandwidth an app or mailing activity will take can help you avoid such issues. You can always calculate the approximate data transfer for a day and extrapolate that data for the month or year or whatever your billing cycle is. This means that you should have a fair estimate for knowing whether you will run out of it in future. Always keep a buffer of about 20-30% of your usage in the calculation. If you are planning a massive marketing campaign or online promo you may want to provision for more bandwidth on a temporary basis. Many award show websites or event websites tie-up with their web host to allow a spike in bandwidth just for a few days till the time that the programme is over. After this period they shift to a standard plan for the rest of the year.

Usually websites which have been transferred in for the first time, may face issues in their first month of service, due to the data transfer used up during the migration. This will normalize with time.