What is Bandwidth or Download?

 In this article you will learn about Bandwidth. Understanding the Bandwidth or data transfer is very important in the web hosting world. 

What is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth is a measurement used to measure the amount of data passing through a network for a given time. In the computer field Bandwidth is also known as data transfer rates. Bandwidth is measured in MB (Mega Bytes) or GB (Giga Bytes). 

Every time you communicate with another computer on the network, you are sending and receiving the data over the network. As a result of communication you are using the network Bandwidth. For example if you access any website or sends or receives the emails you are creating the traffic on the website and using the bandwidth or the server.

If your people uses your corporate network, the Bandwidth uses of your network increases. So, any communication over the network uses some Bandwidth.

Web Hosting and Bandwidth
These days hosting companies offers variety of bandwidth options in their plans. In the context to the web hosting, 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 also depends on their own infrastructure like the network capacity, network redundancy etc. Most of the hosting services providers have their own data centers with multiple high speed internet links. Hosting companies uses optical fiber high speed network links to the internet at their data centers. OC 4 network line is very high speed internet link used by most of the hosting service providers.

How much Hosting Bandwidth is enough?

When choosing a host, the amount of bandwidth you choose to purchase is very important for the success of your web site. Generally speaking, the more amount of bandwidth you have, the more traffic your site will be able to handle at one time.

The bandwidth requirement of your web site depends on the number of pages and visitors count on your web site. The size of page is very important as it actually determines your Bandwidth requirement of your web site. A web page size may very from few Kilobytes to 100s of Kilobytes. 

The formula for calculating bandwidth can be:

Average Daily Hits * Average size of the page.

For Example if you site is getting 10,000 hits per day and the average size of the page is 70 KB then your bandwidth requirement would be  10,000*70 = 100000 KB per day or 97 Approx.

Most of the web hosting companies offers hosting plans with different bandwidth (measured in GB or Gigabytes per month) in the plan. So, you can multiply your daily bandwidth requirement by 31 to get the approx monthly bandwidth requirement.

How you can save Bandwidth
You can save you Bandwidth by optimizing your web pages. Here are list of the things that you can do to save your bandwidth

• Optimize your image size and reduce its size to minimum
• Keep the size of page small
• Use the CSS to reduce the page size