Business Directory and Guide - iBizDir.com

What is bandwidth, and how do you know how much you need for your website? According to www.techterms.com, “Bandwidth refers to how much data you can send through a network or modem connection. It is usually measured in bits per second, or ‘bps.’ You can think of bandwidth as a highway with cars travelling on it. The highway is the network connection and the cars are the data. The wider the highway, the more cars can travel on it at one time. Therefore more cars can get to their destinations faster. The same principle applies to computer data -- the more bandwidth, the more information that can be transferred within a given amount of time.” As far as the novice webmaster is concerned, when it comes to bandwidth, more is definitely better.

For example, here is a list of applications that require plenty of bandwidth in order to run in a timely fashion: web cams, bit torrents, streaming videos, and online gaming. If your site makes use of any of these, you need some serious bandwidth for the site to be worth using.

On the other hand, here are some applications that really don’t require much bandwidth to run properly: search services, email, streaming audio news, and Internet telephony, like Skype or Vonage.

If your website is going to feature shopping, still graphics, and text, with maybe a little video thrown in, you’ll probably do fine with the standard amount of bandwidth offered by web hosting providers. But  how do you calculate how much bandwidth your site needs? Here is a way to estimate:

First ask yourself,
“How many users do I expect to access my website? Dozens? Thousands? Millions?”
“How many pages will my site have?”
“How big are the HTML and graphics files?”

First, add up the size of one of your typical HTML pages and the sizes of the image files on the average page. Next, multiply this by the number of pages in your site, and then multiply again by the number of visitors you expect in a month.

For example, say the average HTML file is 10kb, or 10,000 bytes and has 5kb, or 5000 bytes worth of images on it. Your site will eventually have 100 pages, and you expect 5,000 visitors per month. You would multiply
15,000 x 100 x 5000 = 7,500,000,000

But consider this: nobody is going to read all 100 pages. A generous estimate would say each visitor reads only 10% of the pages, so let’s multiply that 7,500,000,000 by 0.1 (which is 10%) to get 750,000,000 bytes. This is equal to 0.75GB of bandwidth you might use in a month. Therefore, a plan that offers you 1 GB bandwidth in a given month will most likely work just fine with your site. You don’t need to buy service offering 10GB to 15GB a month unless your site is going to provide downloads of large files like videos and music.

You should also beware of providers offering “unlimited” bandwidth. Sure, unlimited bandwidth sounds good, because you’ll never run out. Actually, unlimited bandwidth is a physical impossibility. The connections can only carry so much data per second. But most hosting service providers don’t use anything close to all the bandwidth they have available. Anyone offering “unlimited” bandwidth is counting on you not really needing that much. Most likely, they use the term “unlimited” to draw you – the novice webmaster – in.
If you have a small website and you know it’s not going to need massive amounts of disk space and bandwidth, then an “unlimited” bandwidth plan may work fine for you. But you have to carefully read the terms of service. Most “unlimited” bandwidth plans do not allow you to have audio or video downloads. These are the types of files that really use up bandwidth. In other words, it’s easy to get “unlimited” bandwidth only if you don’t really need it.

Check in the hosting company's Terms of Service: there will probably be a note about what "unlimited" really means. If you agree to an unlimited bandwidth package, and then put up a site featuring downloads of big video or audio files, your host will either charge you extra, or shut down your site altogether. It is very important to read the fine print in the terms of service, so you’ll know if this is the case.

Just remember:
Text + graphics = not a lot of bandwidth necessary
But:
Text + graphics + audio downloads + video downloads =  plenty of bandwidth required

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