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Managing Your Bandwidth

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A Guide to Managing & Optimising Bandwidth

High bandwidth usage can lead to slow load times, overage costs, and a poor user experience. Whether you’re scaling a growing business or managing multiple client sites, understanding where your data goes is the first step toward a leaner, faster server. In this guide, we’ll show you how to track your usage in Plesk and implement high-impact strategies to keep your traffic under control.

Where to View Your Bandwidth

Before you can optimize, you need to identify the culprits. Plesk provides two ways to look at your data:

  • For an individual domain, head to Websites & Domains. Look at the Right-Hand Sidebar (or the Statistics tab) to see a summary of your current month’s traffic.
  • To see which site is the “bandwidth hog” on your server, go to Tools & Settings > Info & Statistics > Traffic Usage. This breakdown helps you identify which specific domains are consuming the most resources so you can take targeted action.
  • Via the command line, the vnstat command can be useful to find daily or monthly usage.

Common Causes of High Usage

Bandwidth spikes usually fall into two categories: heavy content or unwanted visitors.

  • Unoptimised Media: Hosting 4K videos or raw, high-resolution images directly on your server is the fastest way to hit your limit.
  • Aggressive Bots & Scrapers: Not all traffic is human. Malicious “scrapers” or poorly configured search bots can visit your site thousands of times a day, draining your data.

How to Reduce Consumption

Once you’ve identified the cause, use these “Plesk-ready” strategies to slim down your site:

1. Optimise Your Assets

  • Image Compression: Convert images to WebP format and use compression tools before uploading. This can reduce file sizes by up to 80% without losing quality.
  • Offload Video: Never host video files locally. Use platforms like Vimeo and embed them; this moves the bandwidth burden to their servers.

2. Technical Tweaks in Plesk

  • Enable Smart Caching: Go to Apache & Nginx Settings. Ensure “Smart static files processing” and “Caching” are enabled. This serves files directly from the cache rather than regenerating them for every visitor.

3. Add a Layer of Protection

  • Use a CDN: Implement Cloudflare (Which we do offer!). By serving static files (images, JS, CSS) from Cloudflare’s global edge servers, you prevent that traffic from ever hitting your server at all.
  • IP Banning (Fail2Ban): Use the Plesk Fail2Ban tool (Tools & Settings > IP Address Banning) to automatically block malicious bots that attempt to “crawl” your site too aggressively.

Bandwidth Overages

Should you go over your bandwidth allowance on your package, there is overage fee's for this, which is £030p + VAT per GB over your allowence.

We calculate the bandwidth usage based on the bandwidth transferred outside of our AWS network for all our servers, bar our legacy shared server packages.

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