CDN Bandwidth Usage

Evgeni Yordanov

March 08, 2021 20:21

NitroPack uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve resources from servers that are closest to the users requesting them. This minimizes the distance between visitors and your site's resources, resulting in faster load times.

Your plan's CDN usage increases only when your website’s visitors are served resources (images, fonts, CSS, JavaScript) from the edge location nearest to them. In other words, only the traffic generated by a visit to a page that has to fetch resources from our CDN is accumulated towards your plan’s CDN limit.

As a result, when resources can be served from the browser’s cache, the CDN bandwidth stays the same.

For example, if one user visits the same page five times, NitroPack counts that as five pageviews. However, on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th visit, the user can be served content (like static resources) from the browser’s cache. In that case, the pageview count increases, but the CDN usage stays the same after the first visit.

Larger pages with more resources (like images) generate more CDN usage than leaner pages.

If you want to know how much certain resources contribute to a page’s size, use Pingdom’s speed test tool. It has an entire section on this topic:

Also, if you’re already using NitroPack, you can test the unoptimized version of any page by adding ?nonitro to its URL. That way, you can compare the file size with and without our service.

To keep an eye on your CDN usage, check your NitroPack Dashboard regularly.

The Logs menu also has detailed information about your daily CDN usage and pageview count as well as which resources use the most CDN bandwidth.

Lastly, please note that paid plan users can also take advantage of resource overages. When enabled, overages let you continue using NitroPack, even after exceeding your plan's resources without having to upgrade to a higher plan. Contact our support team via this form, if you want this option enabled for your site.