rucial meetings with your business partners to determine your company image and Internet strategy. You've worked with an accomplished and savvy web designer to get that image and important information prepared for clients and new prospects alike. But when your popularity increases with online traffic, how do you make sure that your website runs smoothly enough to sustain all of the attention that you're getting? The answer is bandwidth. And without it, you're nothing. So get the most that is appropriate for your site. But first, you must learn a little about it.
What exactly is bandwidth? It is the amount of information that can be transferred from a website through your server to online users on a monthly basis. Bandwidth is always expressed in the amount of data, measured in bits, transmitted in one second of time. It looks like this-64Kbps-which means 64 kilobits per second. Remember to distinguish “bits” from “bytes,” as there are eight bits in every one byte. Therefore, 64Kbps is 8KB per second.
Measuring your needs
How much bandwidth you get and how much you need can be different, depending on many factors, such as a sudden increase in traffic to your site, your server's overall bandwidth capabilities, the other sites on your shared server (if that's what you have) and the type of site that you maintain.
Let's say that the server that you use leases a line that allows 3Mbps. This simply means that the server can handle a total maximum of 3Mbits of information from all of its sites in any given second. When there is an unusually high amount of traffic some users will experience varying delays in getting information – slow downloads, etc. – while other users may be prevented from connecting altogether. A lot of servers are shared and not necessarily devoted exclusively to a single website. So, you have to understand that if you share a server for your company website, those other websites will simultaneously and continuously be using up precious bandwidth available through the server, too. And this will affect you.
If you have a relatively simple, straightforward and static website, it is pretty easy to figure out the amount of bandwidth that you'll need. Let's say that your brand new, super-cool and well-made home page has graphic images, back-end style sheets and HTML that add up to 70KB (Kilobytes, not kilobits) per second for each user looking at it. That simply means that 70KB is used from your monthly allowance of bandwidth for your site. But that's just one person taking a look and engaging with your site. What about two people? Or ten people? Or even 100 people or more? We'll say that 100 users take a look at your home page on a daily basis. That simply means that you'd use 7MB of bandwidth that's allowed in your monthly contract with your host (70KB times 100 users = 7MB). For the 30 days in a month, then, you'll use 210MB per month. But things change. Traffic increases. Many sites become complicated with elaborate flash design elements and high-resolution graphics and so on. Your bandwidth needs could be much more. But that's no problem, since most hosts these days include unlimited bandwidth except in the lowest priced plans. Bandwidth is rarely an issue anymore.
A lot of site builders and users take the tiny amount of free hosting space provided with their ISP accounts. This has other problems associated with it, too. For one thing, you will not get to use your own domain name, but will have an address that starts with “members” or some other term that gives away the fact that you are using a freebie account. Additionally, you will normally be restricted to using a low-power cookie-cutter page design program with limited templates. It is far better to determine what you need first then find a hosting plan among the many available that works for you. Beware of hosts that offer an open-ended deal that allows increased bandwidth that entails increased fees. These fees can be much more than the unit breakdown rate in your original deal. Time was when hosts would even shut down websites when the customer went over the bandwidth limit. Make sure you get one of the newest, unlimited bandwidth plans and you will be fine, as long as you get the other important features that you have determined that you need.Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from linux virtual private servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. Visit online for more information.
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