Sooo our bill came for the internet this month and of our 40Gb allowed usage, we used 47Gb. Not too much over, but they still charged us £10 for it.

Could anyone please help with tips on how to cut this down a bit? I'l list the things we use on a day to day basis since that'l probably help, if someone could rank how much they probably use of the bandwidth.

 

Both computers:

Runescape

General browsing (few webcomics, facebook, G+, google docs, TIF)

Streaming videos (big bang theory, futurama etc - ~1 to 2 hours a day at most)

Skype (only messaging)

Minor downloads (installs/updates etc)

Hosting a Minecraft or Terraria server (which connects with other non-local users)

Connecting to said server (local connection)

 

One computer:

Steam, mostly just updating but 30+ games to update whenever it likes.

Occasional online gaming through steam

 

XBL (rarely)

Minor downloads to XB/Wii/3DS

 

thanks for any help, I don't really want to cut anything down majorly, just get under the 40Gb limit and know which areas are real problem areas :P

Video streaming won't be helping.

Thought as maybe, hopefully that one should improve a little with me going back to uni in a week or so, meaning it'l just be my brother on the connection

Video streaming, hosting a server are gonna be the top bandwidth eaters; the rest are not gonna do much.

 

You have to bear in mind standard tv show videos are around 150mb for 30minutes and 300mb for an hour, just cause you stream them opposed to download doesn't mean this size disappears. It may be reduced a little, but not by a huge amount.

Use noscript, that could cut down on accidental video loads. Or just get an ISP that isn't evil.

Do you know how much data is used by hosting a Minecraft server?

is there a noscript equivalence for chrome? I'l get something of the like downloaded asap to help I guess

 

Good to know streaming is probably the problem, I'l talk to my brother about it in the morning.

 

Are there any reliable ways to monitor bandwidth usage out there too? As for the minecraft server, I imagine it wont be a very nice amount it uses, but its usually only connected to three or four people for one or two days in any month anyway (just with friends)

"running a server" is not necessarily going to use much bandwidth, it entirely depends on what the server is doing.

 

Streaming videos is the thing you need to cut down on. Stop streaming completely, and I doubt you use 20 gb.

Try using a monitor program... Netlimiter has free registration for just the monitoring bit http://www.netlimiter.com/download.php

Lol we get 5GB a month for the whole family..wish I had 40GB. Cant even youtube. :S

My daytime cap is 40 and I've used like.. 15GB of it. I host games/servers though I have unmetered upload, so it has a limited effect on my overall usage. If I host games/servers I don't notice much of a difference in the downstream.

 

Basically cut out streaming and you'll see a massive drop in usage.

Thanks for all the help guys, guess its back to buying a few more DVDs :P

Or increase the cap? I know you'd be paying more but that sucks. Looks like a lot of people have caps, I don't have one. A lot of people around here go with the same ISP as the one I'm using specifically for this, since they use about 300GB bandwidth per month.

A friend got a message from his ISP (virgin) telling him to cut down on his 'unlimited' usage, that was from hosting a minecraft server. They can take up a lot of traffic with 5+ people online. What's your ISP by the way? You could always consider changing/upgrading.

My ISP is BellAliant and it's one of 2 ISPs in my region, the other being Rogers, which by the way, I was with but was getting 3Mb/s when paying for 10Mb/s and a 95GB limit.

 

Right now I'm paying for 15Mb/s and this is what I'm getting:

Or increase the cap? I know you'd be paying more but that sucks. Looks like a lot of people have caps, I don't have one. A lot of people around here go with the same ISP as the one I'm using specifically for this, since they use about 300GB bandwidth per month.

 

Not really possible here in the UK.

 

Most ISPs offer either a flat 40GB "home" plan OR you can get "unlimited", but the pitfalls of "unlimited" in the UK are as follows - hidden shaping, port throttling and ridiculous spikes in latency/network congestion at peak times of the day. Often it's much less hassle to get a capped but unthrottled/low contention plan than to go through with "unlimited".

Your ISP should have a service to track your daily usage. I know I do, we usually plan out the usage of our 100gb limit by tracking it regularly. Towards the end we make sure we don't go over. Just try and look for something like that.

Gee..40GB seem an awful low cap - my ISP has a 200 GB cap and sometimes I still think it's a bit low.

 

Overall, the biggest bandage users will always be video and audio, followed by games (those are not small). None of the other stuff should add to much (RS is next to to nothing once you've got most of the maps loaded)

 

Either cut down on steam or the videos would be your best bet. And if you got the net elsewhere and a laptop - go leech their bandwidth (pssst library) lol.

Use this program: http://download.cnet.com/BitMeter-2/3000-2381_4-10398686.html

 

It'll let you know how much you've used each day, and you'll also be able to see how much you're using at any second. It gives a really nice idea on what programs use how much data.

Or if you use Vista or 7 there's the network meter gadget.