What's this bandwidth thing again?

First of all, there is one thing we have to make clear. When refering to bandwidth, we are not necessarily talking about bandwidth in the sense of speed of transmission or data transmission rate (bits/second), which is the correct definition for the term "bandwidth". I'm also talking about the so called bandwidth which measures the total amount of transmitted data (bits).

This whole misuse of the term bandwidth started perhaps because most packages come with a specified amount of Gigabytes/month. Some might've considered it to be the same thing as bandwidth because the latter is measured in bits/second. But who knows? Anyway, most likely you already know what I'm talking about. :-)

Still, just to be clear and rigorous I must make a clear distinction between terms. Bandwidth means data transfer rate, which is a speed - the speed of transferring data. Hence unlimited bandwidth would mean, in other words, an infinite speed when transferring data. This does not exist. Speeds are limited in our world. For example we (or at least most of us) believe that the speed of light is the ultimate speed of anything in this universe. However, the speed of light is limited, not unlimited.

Back to definitions, when most hosting companies refer to bandwidth in their shared/reseller hosting packages they actually mean "data transfer", not "data transfer rate". They state for example 5GB of bandwidth, meaning that you'll be allowed to transfer 5GB of data, usually within a period of time of one month. This is the data transfer that you are allowed to use (or consume), the amount of data that is transmitted, not the speed at which it is/can be transmitted.

With that taken out of our way, we will do our best to make sure its clear what kind of bandwidth are we talking about in our articles.

For interesting reading, you should check out this article: unlimited bandwidth

More about "bandwidth"

One of the most confusing concepts that the web hosting industry has to offer is bandwidth. Although small businesses looking for a web hosting might not think bandwidth is a big enough deal to spend hours researching it, bandwidth has the ability to either make or break any website. It affects the speed of your site, the reliability and uptime of the site, and even the professionalism of the website. There are thousands of web hosting companies around the world offering anywhere from megabytes to terabytes of bandwidth from hundreds of different providers. When choosing a web host for your site, it is extremely important to find one with the perfect amount of bandwidth and the best providers.

For most personal or small business sites that are opening up a website for the first time, not a lot of bandwidth will be needed. Whereas for large business and corporation websites, or sites that focus on file mirroring, hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes of high quality bandwidth might be needed. The simple way to figure out how much bandwidth you will need to run your site is to calculate the size of each page your website, usually in kilobytes, and multiply it by how many users you expect to access that page each month. 99% of web hosting companies give you monthly allotments of bandwidth whether you pay monthly or annually. However, it is always a good idea to make sure you know whether your host gives you monthly or yearly allotments of bandwidth. Pretend you want to start up a one page website that has a 100k file size. And you estimate that you will receive 10,000 hits per month. By multiplying these two values together, you will need to buy a web host with 1000000k or 1000mb or 1GB. But remember, if you plan to have a multi page website, the bandwidth usage will be a lot higher than this. File mirroring sites use the most bandwidth because their main purpose is to transfer rather large files to thousands of users worldwide.

Wondering how much bandwidth you need? How to prevent bandwidth theft? How to save bandwidth?