As you may know, each hosting plan comes with its Bandwidth usage limits. Please continue reading below to get more information on that matter.
What would happen to my sites?
There is no automatic site shutoff, as is the case at many Web hosts when the bandwidth limit is exceeded.
Instead, WPX Support will contact the site owner (possibly you) to find out if the bandwidth spike was a one-off or will be an ongoing issue.
Usually, bandwidth consumption is handled by our free CDN (Content Delivery Network), assuming that it is enabled.
What causes high bandwidth usage?
Most of the time clients assume that high bandwidth usage is related to higher site traffic. However, that’s not always the case. Here’s a list of other things which may be the cause.
- Non-optimized high-resolution images.
- Videos that are uploaded directly to the server.
- Large files that are available for direct download from your sites.
How can I prevent that?
Let’s start with the images. There are a lot of plugins that offer image optimization which will greatly reduce your bandwidth consumption. There’s no specific plugin that we recommend, however, you can look up the one with the highest rating and most recent updates.
As for the videos, you can upload them to external video platforms (e.g YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and then embed them on your site. This way they won’t affect your site’s bandwidth consumption negatively.
The same goes for the large files available for download. Uploading them to an external storage service (e.g Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.) would be the best practice.
The best practice would also be using a CDN service. This will drastically help with caching your website’s content which would also reduce bandwidth consumption. For your convenience, we’ve developed our own XDN service, you can find more about it here.
Combining CDN service is also an option. If it’s necessary and you’d like to additionally reduce bandwidth consumption, you can also include CloudFlare’s CDN service which is also free to use. Here you can find a guide on how to set it all up.
Constantly high site traffic.
In this scenario, we would advise upgrading your current plan depending on your usage. If the limit of 400GB still does not suffice, switching over to the Elite plan and having unlimited bandwidth usage would be the best approach.
If you have any other questions on the topic, don’t hesitate to contact the WPX Support Team via live chat (use the bottom right-hand widget) and they will respond and help within 30 seconds or less.