What Kind of Bandwidth Do I Need?
_If you are looking for the right kind of web hosting service to take care of you and your website, you will find that one of the most important factors that you need to consider.
However, many people have no idea what bandwidth is, or how it relates to web hosting, and all too often, they find themselves in a situation where they are locked into a contract and cannot get out! Make sure that this doesn't happen to you.
At the most basic level, you can understand bandwidth as the amount of information that flows over the network. Ever time some accesses your site, whether they pull up your page or download something from it, it is using up bandwidth.
For the most part, bandwidth is calculated by the amount per month and your web host will guarantee you a certain amount of bandwidth that your viewers can use.
With this in mind, it is quite important to figure out how much bandwidth your website is going to need. Leaving aside the idea of being “slashdotted,” where a popular site links to you and suddenly you get millions of views, it is fairly simple to calculate what kind of bandwidth you need.
For instance, if you have a basic hobby website that comes up to around 50 kilobytes in size, you will find that a gigabyte of bandwidth allows you about 20,000 views.
With that figure in mind, you need to remember that as the material goes up in size, the number of people who can view it under a gigabyte's worth of bandwidth will shrink. When you start looking at things like streaming video, download files or music files, you are going to see the size of your web page go up quite quickly.
Of course, this is where offers of unlimited bandwidth with your web hosting comes in. When you see this offer, start reading the fine print. In many cases, an offer of unlimited bandwidth means unlimited so long as you don't post anything like movies or music.
Before you sign anything or agree to start using anyone's service, consider what you know about web hosting and try to figure out what is really being conveyed. This can certainly spare you a rude awakening at a later point in time.
In addition, also keep in mind that many companies will oversell, assuming that most of their customers will not use a fraction of what they are allotted. In fact, there are many web hosting sites where maxing out your allotted amount of bandwidth is grounds for the breakup of your contract.
This is especially common when you are looking at shared accounts, where your website is hosted on the same server as a number of other websites, and there is only so much bandwidth to go around.
Consider bandwidth before you sign on for any web hosting; this can certainly make all the difference.
However, many people have no idea what bandwidth is, or how it relates to web hosting, and all too often, they find themselves in a situation where they are locked into a contract and cannot get out! Make sure that this doesn't happen to you.
At the most basic level, you can understand bandwidth as the amount of information that flows over the network. Ever time some accesses your site, whether they pull up your page or download something from it, it is using up bandwidth.
For the most part, bandwidth is calculated by the amount per month and your web host will guarantee you a certain amount of bandwidth that your viewers can use.
With this in mind, it is quite important to figure out how much bandwidth your website is going to need. Leaving aside the idea of being “slashdotted,” where a popular site links to you and suddenly you get millions of views, it is fairly simple to calculate what kind of bandwidth you need.
For instance, if you have a basic hobby website that comes up to around 50 kilobytes in size, you will find that a gigabyte of bandwidth allows you about 20,000 views.
With that figure in mind, you need to remember that as the material goes up in size, the number of people who can view it under a gigabyte's worth of bandwidth will shrink. When you start looking at things like streaming video, download files or music files, you are going to see the size of your web page go up quite quickly.
Of course, this is where offers of unlimited bandwidth with your web hosting comes in. When you see this offer, start reading the fine print. In many cases, an offer of unlimited bandwidth means unlimited so long as you don't post anything like movies or music.
Before you sign anything or agree to start using anyone's service, consider what you know about web hosting and try to figure out what is really being conveyed. This can certainly spare you a rude awakening at a later point in time.
In addition, also keep in mind that many companies will oversell, assuming that most of their customers will not use a fraction of what they are allotted. In fact, there are many web hosting sites where maxing out your allotted amount of bandwidth is grounds for the breakup of your contract.
This is especially common when you are looking at shared accounts, where your website is hosted on the same server as a number of other websites, and there is only so much bandwidth to go around.
Consider bandwidth before you sign on for any web hosting; this can certainly make all the difference.