What is bandwidth and how do I reduce it?

What's Covered in This Article

• What is Bandwidth?
• How much bandwidth do I have?
• How do I know how much bandwidth I've used?
• What happens when I go over my bandwidth?
• How do I use less bandwidth?
• Bandwidth vs Upload Limit:

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth is how much data one of your videos or images uses when it is sent out to someone to be viewed.

For example, that video you just made and sent out to 3,000 viewers and was watched 500 times, used bandwidth. This is because there was data transferred from our servers to those viewers' browsers.

How much bandwidth do I have?

Your bandwidth amount depends on the type of account you have. We have several types of accounts, which are Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise. For more information, you can view the details of each plan here.

• Free: 1 GB / link / day
• Pro: 4 GB / link / day
• Team: 8 GB / link / day
• Enterprise: 80 GB/ link / day

Bandwidth is determined by 'link', and not in a total amount. This means that one of your links can go over the bandwidth limit but the rest of your account will be just fine.

How do I know how much bandwidth I've used?

You are able to access your ‘bandwidth settings’ to know more about how you are using your bandwidth.

To find this setting:

• Go to your dashboard here: https://share.zight.com/dashboard
• Click on ‘settings’ listed under your name
• Click on the ‘bandwidth’ category

You are also able to change the date to see how your bandwidth was used on a previous day.

We will send you an email to let you know when one of your links is at either 80% or 100% of your bandwidth usage. 

What happens when I go over my bandwidth?

When you have used all of the bandwidth allocated for a video or image, that link will be disabled. Bandwidth resets every day around 1 am Pacific standard time. This means that if you have an item that has gone over this limit it will be available the next day.

The reason we disable it is that going over your bandwidth amount has a real cost to Zight. We use services from Amazon Web Services, a global secure internet hosting company, to store and serve your content. When you go over your bandwidth, Amazon will charge us additional fees. So to prevent that from happening, and from avoiding costing you a lot of extra, we disable it. 

How do I use less bandwidth?

In the desktop apps where you have created your videos or screenshots, there are several settings that you can change.

• If you have a GIF, you can change the GIF compression size.
• If you have a video, you can change the Video quality size.
• If you have a screenshot, you can choose to upload a compressed, rather than an uncompressed screenshot. For more information, click here.

Bandwidth vs Upload Limit:

There is a common confusion between bandwidth and upload size limit. The upload size limit is set to: 

• 100Mb for Free Accounts
• 1GB for Pro Accounts,
• 2GB for Team Accounts,
• 6GB for Enterprise Accounts,

This means that the maximum size of a file to be uploaded to the Zight cloud storage space is as shown above. Upload limit doesn't affect bandwidth.