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Web Hosting Data Transfer: How Much Is Too
Much?
Bandwidth in its simplest terms refers to
the amount of data that flows across a
network wire in a given time period. For
most web hosting providers, that time period
is measured in a month. Web hosting
providers are charged a certain amount per
month or per year for an allocated amount of
bandwidth from backbone providers and
wholesale data centers. That cost is then
passed on to the consumer in the form of web
hosting plans.
How much bandwidth
will my website use?
With so much variation among web hosting
companies, it can sometimes be difficult to
know how much bandwidth your website will
need. So, how much is a gigabyte of
bandwidth anyway? Let's put it in
perspective. If an average web page, images
and all is 50 kilobytes in size, your
website could be viewed 20,000 times! For
the average hobby website, that is more than
enough. Let's further put that 20,000 in
perspective. If each visitor to your website
viewed an average of 4 pages per month, it
would still represent over 5,000 unique
visitors to your website every month.
Beware of bandwidth
usage when offering file downloads
While offering simple web pages doesn't use
up much bandwidth, the same can't be said
about downloading files. If you plan on
allowing people to download music files, pdf
files, flash files, or video files, you can
eat up bandwidth in a hurry even with a
relatively small number of people visiting
your website. If your website offers an
adobe .pdf file that is 1 megabyte in size,
with one gigabyte of bandwidth, you will
only be able to serve up one thousand
downloads. This does not including the html
needed to get people to download the pdf in
the first place.
Video files eat up even more space. A one
megabyte video file represents only seconds
of video. For a half hour presentation, your
video file could easily be over two hundred
megabytes in size! At that size, one
gigabyte would only allow you to offer five
downloads to your visitors. What you plan to
do with your website most definitely will
affect how much monthly bandwidth you
anticipate needing.
Overselling bandwidth
is common in the web hosting industry
Because more people use only a fraction of
their allotted bandwidth per month, most web
hosting providers price their plans knowing
that most people will only use a fraction of
the resources available to them. In fact,
with most companies, if you did use the
maximum bandwidth available to you each
month, you would most likely be shut down.
If you go with a shared hosting account,
your website can be hosted with hundreds or
thousands of other websites. If your website
starts to use a significant portion of the
server's resources, you may find them
pulling the plug on your website. If you
know your website is going to need
significant resources, you should probably
consider getting yourself a dedicated
server.
Knowing what you plan
to do will allow you to know how much you
need
By knowing what you plan to do with your
hosting account, you can have a pretty good
idea of how much bandwidth you're going to
need. If you anticipate that you will be
needing to serve lots of multimedia
including video, music and large amounts of
flash powered pages, you may need to
consider going with a dedicated server. If
your website is just starting out and you
have little money and no real idea of how
much bandwidth you're going to need, pick a
company that gives you more than you think
you'll need at a reasonable price. Make sure
you also find out how much they will charge
you for any bandwidth you use above and
beyond what comes in your hosting package.
If it is one dollar per megabyte and you've
already exceeded a twenty gigabyte bandwidth
limit, changes are, you'll get one hefty
bill at the end of the month. When shopping
around and looking at bandwidth, keep the
overage cost in mind as well and you'll do
fine.
This article was written by Joe Duchesne,
president of http://www.yowling.com/, a web
hosting company that strives to make it easy
to setup and maintain your website.
Copyright 2004 Yowling. Reprint Freely as
long as you link back to my website from
this resource box.
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