Band width is the data transfered from and to the server.

When a visitor comes to your site he surfs throught your web site. This means he was downloading data from your web site server. Activities like viewing web pages, images and downloading your zip and exe files, all uses your band width. But an average web site with 100-200 visitors per day can get along well with the regular alloted band width on their hosting plan.

Here are few tips on saving your band width usage:

1. Subdomains: When creating subdomains and giving access to your visitors think twice before doing this. Because all the files downloading from their folder comes to your account.

2. Images: Try to minimize the number and size of images that you use on your web site.

3. Downloads: If you offering free ebooks or free reports, you can use free storage or web space provided by many free web space services. Some of them are here:

http://www.box.net/
http://www.netfirms.com/

4. Stop hot linking of your web pages and images by others:

Hot linking is when someone links directly to your images or content from their site. So they don’t have to use there bandwidth. This is called ‘band width theft’.

You can stop this hot linking by two methods:-

  • First method:

By using ‘.htaccess’ file: When you are on Apache server and you are enabled ‘Rewrite Mode’ on your server. Just ask your web host that you are Rewrite mode enabled or not.

You have to keep a ‘.htaccess’ file in the root directory, if you want to protect your entire domain images from hot linking. Or if you want to protect images in one folder you can keep this file in that particular folder.

How to create the ‘.htaccess’ file:

1. Open your Notepad or any text editor.

2. Paste these lines-

Rewriteengine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.your_other_domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/error.gif

Third, fourth and fifth lines are with your domain names or domain names that you want to give access to your image files. You can add as many domains as you want like this as allowed domains.

Change ‘yourdomain’ to your web site names.

You can add or delete file extentions as per your requirement in the last line and replace error.gif with your gif name.

Save this as ‘htaccess.txt’ on your computer.

3. Upload this file by ASCII mode by your FTP software.

4. Rename it as .htaccess.

  • Second method:

If you don’t have ‘Rewrite Mode’ on your server, you can use CGI scripts to protect your images and variety of files.

Some of the scripts for that purpose are:

Ace Bandwidth Protector: An excellent FREE script! See the demo on the web site.
http://www.custom-cgi.com/free/bandwidth_protector/

Antileech: Free php script that protects your files. Easy to install with help files.
http://cometo.site88.net/download.php?view.2

Bandwidth Protector: Designed to stop the unauthorized linking of your website graphics from other websites, thereby using your bandwidth to deliver graphics to other website pages. Script is $49.00 to register.
http://www.siteinteractive.com/bandwidth/

Author: Radhika (c)
http://www.webmasters-central.com/




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Posted in: Web Design