Too often the host of Internet sites about bandwidth and data transfer at the same time, but they are different but closely related. Bandwidth is the amount of data can be transferred at once, and data transfer is the amount of data is being transferred.

How it affects your site

Which has less bandwidth, the slower the load on your site, regardless of connection type of visitor. If you have more visitors, some of them will have to wait your turn. The less the data transfer you have, the more often you will find your site because it has not reached the maximum allowed until a new month rolls by or you upgrade your account.

What your needs are?

Normally when one speaks of bandwidth hosting, which refers to your monthly transfer limit. So you need to know what is enough for your site for its operation. You will need to gather some information, which is quite easy to do if you already have a site. Most of this information is available from your traffic history. If you do not have an existing site, provide an optimistic estimate if you intend to heavily promote the site. Then get ready for some math.

“Xx Visitors Page views Page size x 30 days = Monthly Website Transfer”

You should also throw in a small margin of error or take into account email traffic and your own files to the server. If you offer downloads, you must add the following:

“Average / Expected downloads x File Size x 30 days = Monthly Download Transfer”

Unlimited Hosting Plans

Bandwidth is very expensive. All hosts are limited by their own allocations. Think back to the bridge. What happens is that all visitors to your site will be a small lane to transfer the data, the creation of lanes, so many tiny “unlimited”. The more visitors you have, the smaller each lane will be, what he does expect all visitors to the upload page.

Very often there is not enough bandwidth in excess of their choice, as your host controls. Some guests may limit the number of simultaneous connections, the slowdown will affect your site and refusing some visitors. This is called acceleration. If you are worried about this, you should ask the host to control bandwidth of the way in which the use or purchase of a package with more data transfer.

Another good idea is to cache your website but you may want to set an expiration date in the HTTP headers so the browser will refresh the content after a certain time. Use mod-gzip. You could save as much as 40% of their bandwidth. Out of control robots can also suck on their bandwidth like a black hole. Therefore, the use of robots.txt to keep spiders at bay.

- The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second (bps) or bytes per second. For analog devices, the bandwidth is expressed in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz).

From the web hosting point of view, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between a web site and the rest of the internet for a particular server (or host). The amount of bandwidth a web hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their information center and external to the public internet.

Every time someone visits you web site or downloads something from your web site, a certain amount of bandwidth is consumed. Normally every website owner is allotted a specific quantity of bandwidth per month (or monthly limit) which is usually measured in GB.

If there are a lot of people trying to download from a single website or from different websites hosted on the same host, there may be occasions when somebody will be required to wait because the bandwidth limitation of the particular host is being used at full capacity.

Nowadays, we are seeing bigger and bigger websites with several thousand pages, plenty of audio, video and downloadable files which have led to a bandwidth explosion. Online gaming sites are very popular and require huge amounts of bandwidth. Multimedia sites in general require bigger bandwidth and will continue to do so. Plenty of research is going on all over the world to find methods of reducing bandwidth consumption, and at the same time, increase the available bandwidth.

To make a simple calculation of the bandwidth consumption, let’s assume the following example. If you have put up a single page website which is 75KB in size and suppose ten people come to your site on an average every day, then your monthly bandwidth consumption will be =75*10*31 = 23,250KB or 23MB. But chances are you have a multi-page website, and so the average page size and average page views per day are to be used for calculation purposes. Not to mention your site probably includes images and offers downloads and so the bandwidth consumption increases.

Web Hosting providers such as Lunarpages Web Hosting offer as much as 3,500GB of Bandwidth. A basic web hosting package seems to get around 3,500GB of bandwidth among many of the web hosting providers out there right now.

Is bandwidth something that is available in abundance? The answer is NO. There are a lot of technical and practical limitations to this.One prominent factor being the limitations in the availability of telecommunication channels and infrastructure to carry this heavy traffic to various parts of the globe. Without a significant improvement on the infrastructure front, we can’t expect to resolve the bandwidth problem soon enough.