In these days of bandwidth caps and pay-per-kilobyte rates, keeping an eye on your bandwidth usage makes a lot of sense. While there is no lack of bandwidth monitoring utilities, vnStat stands out from the crowd thanks to its ability to store monitoring data in a database and resume monitoring automatically on reboot.

In any operating system, it is possible for an internet user to monitor the bandwidth usage. This is useful to keep track of internet usage in case you have a maximum bandwidth cap or download limit.

NetHogs is a lightweight Linux text-based tool that monitors bandwidth usage, then groups it by process, Network administrators can can see which PIDs are using the most bandwidth, and if necessary, you can kill the process.

Bandwidth limitation is still a problem for a lot of people who connect to the Internet. You can improve your available bandwidth by installing Squid caching proxy server on your network with configuration parameters that will increase your byte hit rate, giving you about 30-60% more bandwidth.

Administrators can use SafeSquid to granularly distribute bandwidth across the network, depending on user, group, website being visited, mime or file type being accessed, and time / date range. This is achieved by defining the desired situation, by creating a profile under the Profiles section, and then allocating a specific bandwidth (QoS) to that profile.

More and more I’ve been using ssh tunneling, encrypted emails or privacy networks while I’m online. Between (US) government sponsored wiretaps, to identity theft there are plenty of people out there that want to know what you’re doing and get your information. This is one of the reasons I recently looked into donating some bandwidth to the Tor network.

DarkStat is a simple Packet Sniffing Network Traffic/Bandwidth monitoring utility for Linux and UNIX. DarkStat presents simple webinterface with nice graphs and stats auto-refreshed. Darkstat uses a very low footprint and the memory, CPU usage and is used in pfSense, redWall opensource firewalls.

Ads and banners not only unnecessarily consume bandwidth, but also distract users, and can be exceedingly irritating at times. Few ads and banners keep rotating and fetching new contents, and keep consuming bandwidth in the background.

June is Bandwidth Conservation Month (well, not officially, but let's say that it is), so if you have multiple machines running an APT-powered Linux distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu, you should take a look at apt-proxy, a utility that caches package downloads in a shared pool for all interested parties on your LAN.