What Is Bandwidth?
You must have come across the term ‘bandwidth’ it is a term used by all web hosting companies commonly. Wondering what the term has to do with them? I will explain to you the details about bandwidth in this article.
About Bandwidth
Bandwidth is said to be the amount of data that is transferred from point to another in a given period of time. This data is measured in bits and time is usually calculated in seconds. Sometimes, bandwidth is also measured in bytes per second. Bandwidth is also referred to as the Data Transfer Rate.
For example, imagine a long pipe or tube. If you pour water from one end of the tube, it will come out through the other. You can say the capacity of water or data that comes out in one second is the bandwidth of that tube. If you have a wider tube, you can get more water in one second. If you have a very narrow tube, water will take too long to reach the other end. This is the concept of bandwidth. Now let us see what bandwidth does in web hosting.
Bandwidth in webhosting
When opening a new website for yourself, it can be very tricky to calculate how much bandwidth you need for your site. There will usually be a number of options to choose from. In the beginning, actually nobody can do better than just a random guess.
For the first few months, you will either pay for more bandwidth than you need or worse end up with fully used bandwidth; your site won’t load to visitors. Also if you go above your bandwidth limit, you will be paying some sort of fine.
So to calculate the amount of bandwidth you need for your site, follow these steps:
- First calculate the size of each page in your website. Let’s say each page in your website is 10 KB. And say you have 5 pages. Then 5X10=50 KB.
- Multiply this by the number of visitors each month. Let’s say 1000 visitors. So you get 50kb X 1000 visitors = 50000 of bandwidth which is roughly 49mb. This calculation may seem very simple. But to know the average visitors per month, you need to actually wait for at least 3 months after your site is live. After that, you will be sailing fairly smooth in your bandwidth calculations.
Even if you host your site with rich content, and your site is moderately popular, you can do very well under 10 GB. Also with the web hosting clients, it is a general practice to purchase triple their estimated bandwidth or even more. Paying for that extra few GB is cheaper than paying the penalty for over usage. It is surely better than getting your site shut down at peak time because of no bandwidth, when there are visitors looking for your site.
If you are looking for any clarification about some or any feature of web hosting, or if you need to open a website for yourself, contact us.
Our company features all kinds of web hosting services for all types of websites at reasonable prices. Our customer support can clear up all doubts and explain about more features to you.