Type: How-to
Category: Umbraco Cloud > Usage and plans
Tags: usage, usage page, bandwidth, bandwidth usage, bandwidth allowance, bandwidth limit, bandwidth notification, 90% bandwidth, 100% bandwidth, media storage, storage usage, custom domains, Insights, Settings, can't find usage, top paths, bandwidth by path, bandwidth by source, referrer, bandwidth forecast, bandwidth history, Cloud Portal

Product: Umbraco Cloud
Version: N/A (Cloud Portal feature)

Summary

The Usage page in the Umbraco Cloud Portal shows how much bandwidth, media storage, and custom domains your project is using, and which paths use the most bandwidth. In the current Cloud Portal, you find it under Insights -> Usage.

Use it when you get a notification that your project has used 90% or 100% of its bandwidth allowance, or when you want to check usage before changing plan.

Looking for Settings -> Usage? Older guides and screenshots say the Usage page is in the Settings menu. That menu is no longer in the Cloud Portal. Usage now sits under Insights in the left sidebar.

Open the Usage page

Log in to the Umbraco Cloud Portal and open your project.
In the left sidebar, select Insights.
Select Usage.

The left sidebar groups project pages into Overview, Insights, Configuration, Security, and Management. Insights also holds Project History, Hostname Monitoring, Traffic & Performance, and Environment Logs.

What the Usage page shows

Usage overview: your plan and this month's usage of Bandwidth, Media storage, and Custom domains.
Bandwidth forecast: an estimate of your end-of-month bandwidth. It appears once there are at least three days of data. It's an estimate, not a measured total.
Bandwidth history: daily usage for the last 31 days, or monthly totals for the last 12 months.
Repository: the size and health of your Git repository.
Media storage: the largest files in your Live environment, sorted by size. Select Show all to see up to 50 files.
Bandwidth sources: which paths and referrers use the most bandwidth (see below).
Collected for insight: database size, disk usage, and content nodes, with up to six months of history.

Usage figures are collected once a day, so today's traffic may not show yet. New projects show No usage collected yet until the first collection has run.

Find what uses the most bandwidth

On the Usage page, go to Bandwidth sources.
Select By path. You see the paths in your Live environment with the most bandwidth this month, with the request count and bandwidth for each.
Select Show all 10, then Show top 50 to see up to 50 paths.
Select By source to see the top 10 referrers, the sites sending traffic to yours.

The path list shows requests and bandwidth, not file size. To see file sizes, use the Media storage list.

If you need a specific time window, for example the hours around a traffic spike, go to Insights > Traffic & Performance instead. Select at least one hostname, and you can see requests and data traffic by path for up to the last 90 days, 30 days at a time.

How bandwidth is measured

Bandwidth is the data sent from your Live environment to visitors during the current month.
Everything a visitor loads counts, not just page views. That includes images, downloads, and other files.
Responses served from the cache at the edge still count, even when the request never reaches your site.
Third-party services use bandwidth too. For example, an uptime monitor that checks your site every minute adds up over a month.

Because of this, the bandwidth on the Usage page is often higher than what your analytics tool suggests. Analytics tools usually count page views by real visitors, while bandwidth counts every file served, including traffic from bots.

Reduce your bandwidth usage

Compress images and use modern formats such as WebP.
Cache static files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript.
Host videos on a platform such as YouTube or Vimeo and embed them, instead of serving the video files from your site.

For more ideas, including how to handle bot traffic, see Optimize bandwidth usage on Umbraco Cloud. If one path or one referrer is using a lot of bandwidth, see Site downtime caused by DoS, DDoS, or bot attacks for how to spot hotlinking and block a referrer.

Still having issues?

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Where to find bandwidth and storage usage in the Umbraco Cloud Portal