Browsing the internet has become such a seamless experience that we rarely think about it these days. However, every once in a while, you might come across an error that you don’t understand. As rare as these errors are, they can throw quite a rut in your browsing experience.
In this article, we’re talking about the bandwidth limit exceeded error, its causes and what you can do to fix the problem.
What causes the bandwidth limit exceeded error?
As the error itself suggests, you’ll see it show up when a particular site receives far too much traffic than the servers can handle or that the host will allow depending upon the server space available to the site.
Since this is a developer-facing error, if you’re seeing this while simply visiting a site, there’s not much you can do about the issue. However, if you’re a developer seeing this error there are several workarounds you can implement to give your users a better online experience.
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How to fix this error?
Here are four fixes you can try out.
Enable CDN caching
CDN caching is a great way to reduce server load on your sites. It caches the site contents on CDN servers and fetches them to the client browser reducing server load. This is a good approach if you’re getting a lot of traffic on your site and can reduce loading times for visitors coming from other regions of the world which might not be very close to your host server.
Based on your hosting provider, the exact way to implement this can vary. For example, Wordpress CDN caching works differently as compared to custom-coded websites.
Optimise your website
Optimising your website includes reducing file sizes of images and any other media files that the user’s browser needs to download before the site can be loaded, reducing the number of scripts to be loaded, optimising databases and file storage and enhancing the overall user experience.

Once again, the way you do this can vary based on what hosting provider and backend technology you’re using for your website. For sites built-on frameworks like Wordpress, optimising your site can be a matter of installing a certain plugin. Sites that are developed with your own code will likely benefit more from optimisations however as the developer has more control over how everything works.
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Reduce or avoid hotlinking
Hotlinking is referred to when a URL on a site points to an image or another file on the same site. This can overload the server with unnecessary requests causing performance issues and even crashes in extreme cases as it can significantly increase the bandwidth usage of your site.
Apache servers have built-in hotlink preventions that can be accessed from the htaccess file. Simply edit your htaccess file to include the following code to disable hotlinking altogether.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?[enter your domain name here] [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?bing.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yahoo.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|svg)$ http://dropbox.com/hotlink-placeholder.jpg [NC,R,L]
Additionally, if you’re using Nginx, you should also add the following code to your config file
location ~ .(gif|png|jpeg|jpg|svg)$ {
valid_referers none blocked ~.google. ~.bing. ~.yahoo. [enter your domain name here] *.[your domain name];
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}
Get a better hosting plan
If nothing else works, your best bet is to get a better hosting plan. This will give you more server resources and ultimately bandwidth to work with to ensure that such errors don’t occur again. That is until you hit a certain amount of traffic where the server resources start getting overburdened again.
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