If your business is booming, then you’ve probably realised that your cheap web host probably isn’t going to cut it anymore. However, transferring web hosts can be a pain and if you’re stuck in a long term contract, you may as well try to optimise your website and reduce the amount of bandwidth that your website is using. Let’s not confuse bandwidth with traffic. They do correlate, but it is possible to reduce the amount of bandwidth you are using and still retain the same amount of traffic, and here are just a few ways to do that.

Message Queuing to Deal with Traffic Spikes

Message queuing doesn’t exactly mean queuing text messages or comments to be sent to you. It actually refers to the applications that you are using on your website and how they interact with user input. For instance, if you have a website that interacts with a database of user information, then each time your users change something a request is made in the form of a Message that is sent to the database which is held by your web host. If requests are sent one at a time, it can add up over a long period of time and if hundreds of users are making changes to their account details or orders, then this usage will pile up and eventually cause a traffic jam of data.

To prevent this, Message Queuing enables you to process these requests much more efficiently. Instead of sending just a single message several times, it sends several requests all at once, reducing the number of times messages need to be sent and thus improving efficiency. This is all stuff that goes on behind the scenes and it’s not something you or the user actually sees. If you want more information about messaging queuing, check out this informative article titled “Message Queues & You – 12 Reasons to Use Message Queuing”. There are a lot more scenarios detailed in that post and a good summary of how message queuing can help your website.

Removing Large Files

When a user visits your website, they have to download web page data from your web host in order for it to be displayed on their web browser. This takes up time and it uses up part of your data limit. If your website has a lot of large images and big video files to display, then this naturally increases the amount of data that has to be transferred, thus increasing the amount of bandwidth each user uses.

By cutting out unnecessarily large files and flashy effects from your website, you could drastically reduce the amount of bandwidth that your website is using. This also optimises your website for mobile platforms when users are using limited roaming data, making your website’s user experience great even on portable devices. A great tip to reduce the data size of your images is to compress them using a tool such as TinyPNG, a free web service that reduces the file size of your images.

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