Wednesday, December 27, 2006

What is WebHosting Bandwidth

What is web hosting bandwidth?



Bandwidth is the amount of data sent to your website visitors at a time.
Transfer (traffic) is the amount of data sent to your visitor in a period of time (usually a month). Notice that for a shared hosting plan, bandwidth is shared among the customers, so for an oversold hosting bandwidth could get very low.


How to reduce your hosting bandwidth?
Make sure your images, pages are well optimized, so that your bandwidth is lower, therefore your monthly transfer is also reduced.

Verify that your hosting has a good internet connection, so your pages will load fast for your visitors.

Also, you should prevent hotlinking. Hotlinking means bandwidth theft. If you have an image (video), and someone wants to use it on his website, it places a link of that image to your website, instead of copying it. This is bandwidth stealing. Imagine if you have thousands of large files, what would happen?

Unlimited hosting bandwidth?
Yeah sure! How can bandwidth be unlimited? Bandwidth has a limit, so unlimited bandwidth is a myth. Unlimited space is impossible to offer to.

For video hosting or image hosting, bandwidth needs to be as high as possible, and also the disc storage and monthly traffic need to be high. For example for a 1MB file, with only 1000 downloads daily, you consume 1MBx1000 = 1000MB = 1GB traffic daily. So if your hosting has only 15GB monthly traffic (when you need 30GB/month) there is a big problem.

Hostmonster for example offers 999GB of transfer monthly. This is enough for a small/medium website. If you need more than 999GB traffic, you should consider a dedicated hosting plan.

No comments: