Hosting Guide's >> Bandwidth Or Data Transfer?, which is it.
Bandwidth Or Data Transfer – Which is Which?
Too often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the same breath
but truth be known they are different although very closely related. Bandwidth
is how much data can be transferred at a time and data transfer is how much data
is being transferred.
Think of it this way. If bandwidth were a bridge, then the bigger the bridge is
the more vehicles can pass through it. While data transfer is the number of
vehicles allowed on the bridge in say a month. In essence, data transfer is the
consumption of bandwidth.
How It Affects Your Site
The less bandwidth you have, the slower your site takes to load regardless of
the visitor’s connection type. If you have more visitors, some of them will have
to wait their turn. The least data transfer you have, the more often you’ll find
your site unavailable because you’re reached the maximum allowed until a new
month rolls by or you upgrade your account.
Determining Your Requirements
Usually when a host talks about bandwidth, they are referring to your transfer.
So you need to figure out what is sufficient for your site to function. You’ll
need to gather some information; fairly easy if you already have a site. Most of
this information is available from your traffic history. If you don’t have an
existing site, provide an optimistic estimate if you intend to heavily promote
the site. Then get ready for some math.
Find out the daily averages of: -
· Number of visitors / expected number of visitors
· Page size including the graphics of the page
· Page views / expected pages viewed by each visitor
Then, multiply them as follows:
Visitors x Page size x Page views x 30 days = Monthly Website Transfer
You should also throw in a small margin or error there to take into account
email traffic and your own uploads to the server. If you offer downloads, then
you should add the following:
Average/Expected downloads x File Size x 30 days = Monthly Download Transfer
Unlimited Plans
Bandwidth is very expensive. All hosts are limited by their own allocations.
Thinking back to the bridge. What happens is each visitor to your site will be
given a smaller lane to transfer the data, creating many tiny lanes therefore
“unlimited”. The more visitors you have the smaller each lane will be, which
makes each visitor wait for the page to load.
More often than not there is little choice over your bandwidth as your host
controls this. Some hosts may limit the number of simultaneous connections so in
affect slowing down your site and refusing some visitors. This is called
throttling. If you’re concerned about this, you should ask the host how they
control bandwidth usage or purchase a package with more data transfer. If you
use HostVoice.net , this information is easily obtainable with one request.
Reducing Transfers
On the other hand, you can reduce your transfer amount by building simpler, more
efficient websites and optimizing your graphics. Refrain from fancy flash
presentations or streaming audio. Use CSS, call JavaScript externally instead of
embedding in every page. Remove unwanted tags, white space and comments. Limit
your META tags to those absolutely necessary. Having too many keywords is not
search engine friendly. Besides many search engines will only review the first
few and ignore the rest.
Another good idea is to cache your website but you might want to set an expiry
date in the HTTP headers so the browser will refresh the content after a certain
time. Use mod-gzip. It could save you as much as 40% of your bandwidth. Out of
control robots can also suck down your bandwidth like a black hole. So use
robots.txt to keep spiders in check.