If you are planing to host a website. This article is written only for you, read carefully before choosing any hosting plan if you don'n know basics.
This is
well written explanation about bandwidth, very useful info.
BandWidth
Explained
Most
hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So
exactly 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.
Network
Connectivity
The
internet, in the most simplest of terms, is a group of millions of computers
connected by networks. These connections within the internet can be large or
small depending upon the cabling and equipment that is used at a particular
internet location. It is the size of each network connection that determines
how much bandwidth is available. For example, if you use a DSL connection to
connect to the internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth therefore
is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form
words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer
and the internet.
If you
have a DSL connection to the internet, you have dedicated bandwidth between
your computer and your internet provider. But your internet provider may have
thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connection
aggregate at your internet provider who then has their own dedicated connection
to the internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single
connection. They must have enough bandwidth to serve your computing needs as
well as all of their other customers. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to
your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to
the internet so it can accommodate your needs and up to 166 other users
(255/1.54).
Traffic
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 the 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. It is
easiest to understand traffic using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the 30th
power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. To put
this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 file
cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder
has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters - A GB is all the characters
in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about
40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).
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. If
the host wanted to decrease the time it took to download files simultaneously,
it could increase the bandwidth of their internet connection (at a cost due to
upgrading equipment).
Hosting
Bandwidth
In the
example above, we discussed traffic in terms of downloading an MP3 file.
However, each time you visit a web site, you are creating traffic, because in
order to view that web page on your computer, the web page is first downloaded
to your computer (between the web site and you) which is then displayed using
your browser software (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) . The page itself is
simply a file that creates traffic just like the MP3 file in the example above
(however, a web page is usually much smaller than a music file).
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 (200 Kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000
bits). This is typically large for a web page. In comparison, Yahoo's home page
is about 70KB.
How Much
Bandwidth Is Enough?
It
depends (don't you hate that answer). But in truth, it does. Since bandwidth is
a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, you should take time to
determine just how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have
bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount
of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis
If you
do not intend to provide file download capability from your site, the formula
for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward:
Average
Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor
If you
intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth
calculation should be:
[(Average
Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) +
(Average
Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor
Let us
examine each item in the formula:
Average
Daily Visitors - The number of people you expect to visit your site, on
average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could
be from 1 to 1,000,000.
Average
Page Views - On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view.
If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of
those pages each time they visit.
Average
Page Size - The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have
already designed your site, you can calculate this directly.
Average
Daily File Downloads - The number of downloads you expect to occur on your
site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a
visitor downloads a file, on average, each day.
Average
File Size - Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site.
Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded,
you can calculate this directly.
Fudge
Factor - A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that
your estimate is off by 50%. However, if you were very unsure, you could use 2
or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements are more than met.
Usually,
hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why
our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.
Summary
Most
personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per
month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you
expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth
plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your
hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic
to your site will be significant, you may want to go through the calculations
above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.
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