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Bandwidth Explained

Whether you're in the web hosting business or in the market for a new website, bandwidth is a term that will be thrown around quite a bit, and it's important to understand exactly why it's such a huge factor. The simple explanation of bandwidth is the amount of traffic that passes between your website and other computers connected to the internet. Depending on the quality of the network provided by your hosting company, you will have higher or lower bandwidth limitations.

A basic conceptualization of bandwidth is a great start in understanding what it is, but in order to grasp the importance of it, a more in depth explanation is necessary. The internet, on a basic level, is millions of computers that are interconnected via different networks. The connections between these networks vary in size, and this is what determines the bandwidth of a particular website. Bits are the individual measurements that begin to make up the total bandwidth of a page, and represent individual characters. Bits are then grouped together to form words, images, or any other important information that needs to be relayed. Groups of bits are called 'Bytes'.

Basically, you have a set amount of data that can be transferred between your website and the internet before your specific bandwidth plan is exceeded. For example, let's say your website is a grocery store checkout line. In this analogy, bandwidth would be the amount of lines you have opened at any given time, and as a result, the amount of checkers needed to manage said lines. If only one line is open and there happens to be a lot of customers in the store, you would need to hire more checkers in order to allow customers to move through your store quickly. This is why it is important to understand what kind of traffic your site will be getting, and plan your bandwidth specifications accordingly, because if you aren't paying for high enough bandwidth your costs will go up significantly when you exceed your limit. Generally, a site that is purely content will need much less bandwidth than one that is a fully operational online store.

What Uses Bandwidth?

• Users visiting your website. Each individual visitor will be communicating with your server using data; the more visitors at any given time means higher bandwidth usage
• The page views per each separate user. The further that people go into your site, or the more pages they view, drives bandwidth usage up
• The size of images used throughout the page. To put it simply: bigger images means more data (or bits) being transferred to the user
• Hosting videos on your website will consume quite a bit of bandwidth, as there is a lot of data being communicated through the server

How Can a Great Web Design Team Help?

An experienced web design team will have the ability to build a lightweight and extremely functional website for you. "Lightweight" in this case doesn't mean lacking in features or exceptionally bare, it means there is no extraneous or unnecessary code built in. This ensures that each page on your website will download quickly and consume the least amount of bandwidth possible. When bandwidth is close to being exceeded by a client of Web Shop Manager, they will be notified before any action is taken on their monthly plan. In order to prevent any unwanted charges, we will discuss the possibility of increasing the amount of bandwidth being paid for.