TheWebsiteFriend.com :: What is Bandwidth
What is Bandwidth? And what does it have to do with web hosting? Bandwidth is the measurement of how much data has been transmitted over a network connection. There are different measurements of bandwidth but he most commone one is Mbps (Megabits per second) or Kbps (kilabits per second). This is a measurement of how much data was transmitted over a given connection in a specific amount of time (in this case 1 second). To make this easier to understand think of it like this: If you sign up for a brand new website hosting account and your current bandwidth usage is lised as 0 and then up upload a picture you just took of your dog sparky (the file size of the pic of sparky is 1MB) so then your bandwidth usage at that moment should be 1MB. This is because you've tranmitted 1MB of data to your hosting account. As people view your picture of sparky they will be using 1MB of bandwidth for each viewing (unless their browser cached the picture which most do but for the purpose of this article lets ignore caches for now). So bandwidth as it pertains to website hosting is simply the amount of data which has been transmitted to/from your website hosting account. The more data you upload, the more visitors you have who are downloading from those files the more bandwidth you will use.
How much bandwidth will I need? This isn't always going to be an easy question for your to answer but here are a couple tips. If this is a brand new website which is going to be a blog with only a few pictures and mostly text, the smallest shared hosting account your web host offers will probably be fine. If you are planning on hosting a gallery of pictures from your sisters wedding, and you have over 1000 people who want to see and download these pictures, you're going to want to probably get a bit larger of a plan. Pictures are larger files than text files and the more of them you have the more bandwidth your website will use. So you'll want to take that into consideration. The other thing you'll want to consider is video and audio files. If you are going to host a 10 minute video on your home page then you are going to need alot more bandwidth than someone simply hosting a text diary blog.
How can I limit the amount of bandwidth my website uses? This is an important thing to consider. As there are ways to limit your bandwidth and I highly recommend you take advantage of them.
- Compression = Compression is a technique where a computer system uses a complex algorithm to represent the same data in a "short-hand" version. This allows you to save both disk usage and bandwidth usage since the same picture of sparky that was originally 1MB might be compressed down to half that size. For example a file which was originally 5MB (five MegaBytes) might be compressed down to 3.5MB (three and a half Megabytes). Using compression will save disk space and bandwidth and is highly recommended.
- Versioning = Versioning is a technique where you provide multiple versions of the same content one which is low-quality and one which is high-quality (or high-speed vs low-speed, or high-bandwidth vs low-bandwidth, etc) this way users who are on slower connections or those who do not car about the fancy pictures can simply select the low-quality version which will have small or no pictures, and or pictures instead of video to save bandwidth. The high-quality version by comparison might have high-quality video representations of the features which were only pictures in the low-quality version allowing those users who have the bandwidth capacity and the time to select your "high-quality" website version.
- Plan Ahead = By planning ahead I mean that you should spend some time thinking about the bandwidth cost of anything you add to your website. If you are considering using a fancy image as a background perhaps consider a different design method. A massive image of a lion for use in the background on your zoo website might take 40 minutes to download for a dial-up user and even 1.5 minutes for a high-speed user. Instead consider planning a design which will load fast, look good, and perform equally for the users with low-end computers and networks as for the users with the newest fancy quad-core desktop and high capacity fiber-optic network connection.
As time goes by less and less emphasis is being put on making a website flashy and more and more emphasis is being placed on a standards compliant website which looks good and has excellent performance. Nobody likes waiting for a website to load and at this day and age there is little reason they should have to. Remember that your visitors are only one-click away from visiting your competitors website. So making them wait too long for something really flashy to load can hurt you more than it can help you.