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What Is Bandwidth? |
You download a file when you access a web site. This file can be an HTML
web page, a GIF image, a MIDI sound file, or a combination of these. These
files are downloaded to your computer and displayed in your web browser.
Data is being transferred, each time you download a file The chunk of
data depends on the size of the file. If you download a web page that
is 1 kilobyte (1,024 bytes), or 1 KB, in size, it means 1 KB of data has
been transferred. If 100 people access that same web page, then 100 KB
of data has been transferred.
Bandwidth basically is the bunch of data (files located on your domain
that are viewed by visitors, email, file transfer protocols that can be
send/received by your web server. You can understand how important this
factor is when buying a web hosting plan or leasing a web server. Generally
speaking, the more bandwidth you have, the more visitors can visit your
web site.
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How to determine how much bandwidth is needed |
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To determine how much bandwidth you need per month, you will need to have
a look at your web site statistics. Visitors per month times avg. data transferred
per month per user = Amount of Bandwidth used per month. Bandwidth is usually
measured in MB or GB. It is not very important to get the exact number of
visitors. An approximate number will be sufficient for calculating the monthly
bandwidth usage.
Whereas the accuracy of the numbers in the first part of the calculation
was a rather unimportant factor it plays a big role in the second part
of the calculation. Finding the average files transferred can be difficult
if your web site is very large, since it has to be done for every single
page. To find the size, add up the size of every image on the page and
the size of the page of every single page on your web site. To make life
a little easier for you it is recommended to use the following loading
time test tool. Once you've obtained that number add 25% - 33% to that
number to give your web site room and allow it to grow.
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Term Meaning Number of Bytes |
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- KB Kilobyte 1,024
- MB Megabyte 1,048,576
- GB Gigabyte 1,073,741,824
Bandwidth is the term used to measure the amount of data being transferred
from your web space. This does not directly relate to the number of 'hits'
(views) a web site receives. One single hit to a web page that
is 100 KB in size uses the same amount of bandwidth as 100 hits to a 1
KB page.
You will want to be wary of any host offering a certain amount of 'hits'.
Always look for a bandwidth allotment when looking for a host.
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How much do I need? |
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Let's imagine we give three people, Jack, Martha, and Kris, each a $1,000
gift certificate to a shopping mall. They can spend that however they wish
and take as many different trips to the mall as needed to spend the money.
Martha is a 'value for money' shopper. She buys a lot of small items
over a period of time, making many trips to the mall.
Kris makes fewer trips than Mary, spending around $100 each time purchasing
quite a few items each trip.
Jack is an impulsive spender. He buys a new stereo system and spends
the whole $1,000 in one trip.
If the $1,000 is an amount of bandwidth, with the shopping mall being
the web server, here's what it would boil down to. Martha's site would
be a smaller web site with very few graphics, but lots of traffic (hits).
Her site wouldn't use a lot of bandwidth per hit. Kris' site would have
a lot of graphics and other overhead, so hers wouldn't take as many hits
to use up her bandwidth. Jack's site would offer a large file for download,
probably a shareware program or video file. His site would use a lot of
bandwidth with a single hit.
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So what does this mean |
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The above example shows us that there is no defined number of hits available
to a given amount of bandwidth - it depends on what is being downloaded
for each hit. Obviously, the larger the download, the more bandwidth is
used, and thus the less hits you can have for that amount of bandwidth.
How much bandwidth a site will use depends on many factors. You have
to consider what kinds of files people will be downloading, along with
how many people will be downloading them.
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