With a variety of things available to do on the internet, it can certainly be difficult to stop yourself from wasting both time and bandwidth online. Many a times it so happens with most users on a fixed plan that they end up exceeding their internet usage, which often leads to exorbitant bills at the end of the month.

If you fall in the same category and would like to get to know some ways that can help you stop exceeding your internet bandwidth limit, then this article is for you. The following eight tips should be more than enough to prevent you from going overboard in your internet usage, provided you follow them diligently and implement the advice that has been given.

If you are a movie buff, then you would most likely get tempted into downloading every latest movie that releases. As we all know, since a dvd rip is at least 700 mb in size, this means that every movie you download pushes you further down the barrel and closer to exceeding your bandwidth limit. The best way to avoid this is by only downloading the top one or two movies per month, depending on your internet plan.

Just a couple of years, everyone used to be crazy about DVDRips, praising the picture and sound quality of the format. But the trend seems to be soon changing. Nowadays a number of video formats are available, which are no doubt better than DVDrips, but only good for those who are on unlimited plans. Further, if you can watch a movie clearly on a dvdrip, what’s the need of going for any other format.

One of the main reasons I recommended staying away from fancy video formats such as Xvid, MKV & BRrip is that they are unusually way bigger in size than DVDrip’s because of the extra clarity and more resolution. While a Dvdrip only takes around 700 mb of space, Xvids are usually double of that, roughly 1400mbs or so. This means that every time you download a Xvid or similar format, you end up wasting double the bandwidth than you would have done if you would have downloaded a Dvdrip.

With the advent of high-definition format, most of us now prefer to watch videos on popular video sharing sites like Youtube and Daily motion only in the HD format. While HD videos are definitely more fun to watch and as such quite better than the normal format, the only downside is that watching too many of these will most likely cause you to pay quite a lot of extra internet usage charge at the end of the month, since HD videos consume way more bandwidth than normal videos.

Another bandwidth saving idea that you can apply is to avoid watching videos in full-screen, since just like HD videos, these too consume way more bandwidth and may lead you to exceed your internet bandwidth quite quickly. A much better way is to watch any video you want in small-screen, which is the default size in Youtube anyway.

If you are fond of television serials and programs, it is likely that you also watch live streaming of some of your favorite shows. If that is the case, then you better stop doing that or at least limiting yourself since live streaming ends up eating a huge amount of bandwidth since the video is being buffered and then being delivered at your end. If you watch too many live streamed shows, then it won’t be long before you’ll find yourself overshooting your internet usage and that too, by a long distance!

Being the tech freaks that most of us are, nearly each one of us has loads of software's and tools for a variety of purposes on our systems. Since some of the softwares also need to be updated from time to time, at times we end up leaving the auto-update option checked which means the update process starts running in the background while we are doing some other things on our system, thereby consuming unnecessary bandwidth that could have been saved, if not for the updates.