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Bandwidth Information-
Most hosting companies offer a variety of
bandwidth options in their plans. So what is bandwidth as it
relates to web hosting? Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of
traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest
of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can
provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to
their data center and external to the public internet.
Understanding Bandwidth:
Bandwidth is directly proportional to the information carrying
capacity, so larger bandwidth equals larger information carrying
capacity. A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and
traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of
lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on that
highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very
quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel
very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up. Traffic is
simply the number of bits that are transferred on network
connections. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format
is about 40MB. If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a web site
to your computer, you would create 4MB of traffic between the web
site you are downloading from and your computer. Depending upon the
network connection between the web site and the internet, the
transfer may occur very quickly, or it could take time if other
people are also downloading files at the same time. If, for example,
the web site you download from has a 10MB connection to the
internet, and you are the only person accessing that web site to
download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that
web site. However, if three people are all downloading that same MP
at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic has been created.
Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth,
someone will have to wait. The network equipment at the hosting
company will cycle through each person downloading the file and
transfer a small portion at a time so each person's file transfer
can take place, but the transfer for everyone downloading the file
will be slower. If 100 people all came to the site and downloaded
the MP3 at the same time, the transfers would be extremely slow.
Increasing the bandwidth would decrease the amount of time it would
take on simultaneous downloads or site visits.
Bandwidth Size:
Many hosting providers place caps on the amount of
bandwidth a site can transfer in a given period
of time, usually a month, but sometimes twenty-four hours or a week.
If the site exceeds its
bandwidth allotment, the service is usually
either suspended or else additional
bandwidth is billed separately, often at a much
higher cost than the base cost included with the hosting plan. Most
personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of
bandwidth per month .A web page may be very small or large depending
upon the amount of text and the number and quality of images
integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for
CNN.com is about 200KB. This is typically large for a web page. In
comparison, Yahoo's home page is about 70KB. You can get an estimate
of the amount of bandwidth your website will require if you know how
large your pages will be and how many people you anticipate viewing
your website on a daily or monthly basis. Since we all anticipate
extensive visitor hits on our websites it is better to plan for the
higher amount and ensure your website is loading quickly for
customers. |
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