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I received a higher than normal monthly bill from my web hosting company. They have told me that I have exceeded my monthly minimum for bandwidth usage and advised me to reduce the file size of my web pages.
Is there any way I could determine the bandwidth I require for hosting my website? Is there a tool that I could use to monitor the usage? I don't know which files I should be working on.
Most hosting companies provide a way to monitor bandwidth usage through their control panels. You could then look and see how much you used this month and use that as an estimate or if they don't they should at least tell you how much you used to incur an overage.
If you absolutely can't get historical bandwidth info A rule of thumb I was given when I worked at a hosting company (years ago) is average page size x highest number of pageviews in one day = daily bandwidth. That would give you a little extra to handle any spikes in traffic. (Note that I don't know how accurate this is as I've never had to use this calculation because most sites that are hosted somewhere already have real bandwidth data and most new sites don't have enough traffic to worry about overages).
While not feasable for larger sites, you could use GTmetrix to analyze a page and see what are your biggest files.
A bonus is that it recommends several other possibilities to further minimize your bandwidth.
