What You Need to Know About Bandwidth For Web Hosting?

In the midst of your web host searching, bandwidth is one of the key criteria that consumers will seriously look into when they consider about the availability of Bandwidth. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that the web hosting provider allows any transfer of data from its server to the users who visited its site in a given period, normally in one month time. Normally the web hosting provider gets their allocated bandwidth from the backbone providers or wholesale data centers to support their clients. Sometimes it is known as data transfer as well.

How do anyone able to tell how much bandwidth do they need? The great hint is that if you are into supporting multiple multimedia such as serving up movies, video files or large images, music or flash powered pages, graphics and pictures, then you would probably need a larger amount of bandwidth compared to those which just started out creating their website. Thus, the amount of bandwidth that your website needs actually depends on the actual purpose of your website itself. On the other hand, for other websites which are not into multimedia serving, any amount of bandwidth size of 50 kilobytes in size would be more than enough.

Here are some of the key variables which you might find useful to predict your website bandwidth requirements,

1. The more your website visitors, the larger the bandwidth amount you would expect to contain.

2. The size of the web page will determine the amount of the bandwidth required. And the size of the web page will largely depends on the embedded images, external JavaScript's files, external style sheets and others.

3. Depends on the download file size. Any website offering download of a very huge file would need to have a higher bandwidth requirements.

4. To simplify the calculation, some multiply the total amount of average downloadable content with the average number of visitors you get every month. Then add some estimated email traffic and FTP transfers that you can anticipated of per month to the first number to get to the estimated amount of bandwidth you would likely need for your website.

Recently there are some common risks on the bandwidth allocation which web hosting users need to watch out for,

Overselling of bandwidth is very common in the cheap web hosting industry, and this had posed a huge risk for the web hosting users.

This is because upon knowing that most of the web users will use up some partition of their bandwidth each month, the web hosting company will oversell their bandwidth for additional profit to more web host users than they really should be. In such case, when the servers bandwidth are over utilized, then the frequency of unexpected downtime of the shared server will become very high and difficult to be avoided.

If there is any unexpected surge of traffics into your website on any particular days or due to some unknown reason, your web hosts will bill their customers additionally on the unexpected traffics which exceed the average allocated bandwidth for that particular month.

Some web hosts will shut down your sites completely when this happen.

Some web hosting users choose to use the " throttle" traffic service provided by the web host ( if it is offered by the web host )to remove any additional traffic on their way coming into your website which had exceeded the allocated bandwidth of your website at any particular day or time.