What is Bandwidth - Bandwidth Explained?
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When selecting a web host, bandwidth can play an important role in the success of your website. So what is bandwidth anyway you may be asking? Basically, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that your website can handle. How much bandwidth a company can provide is dependant upon their network connections.

To better understand bandwidth, one can use an analogy of highways and cars. The number of lanes on the highway is bandwidth and the number of cars on the highway is traffic. When there are very few cars on the highway, you can travel very quickly. On the other hand, when there are many cars on the highway you cannot travel very quickly because all the lanes of the highway are full of cars.

Whenever you visit a website, you create traffic. For you to be able to view a web page, it must be downloaded on your computer and then it will be displayed in your web browser. How much bandwidth do you need when hosting your website? You can estimate how much bandwidth you should look for when purchasing a web-hosting package.

In order to determine how much bandwidth you need, you should first estimate the size of each page on your website by adding the size of all the images and HTML files on each page. You will then need to estimate how many people will view each page. Multiply the size of each page by how many people you anticipate will view that page every month.

For instance, if you have two 10k images on your page and the size of the HTML files is 2k, that page would have 22k of data. Multiply 22k by the expected page views for the month. (For the example we will use 100,000 views per month.) You will have 2.2GB of data to be transferred each month for that one page. Calculate this number for each page on your website to estimate how much bandwidth you will need for your entire website.

If you are planning to offer downloading capabilities on your website, you will need to factor this into your equation. You will need to estimate the average number of downloads from your site as well as the size of the files being downloaded. You will be multiplying the size of each page, by your estimated traffic, by your estimated download number of downloads, by the approximate size of each download.

There are a few ways to save on bandwidth. You can keep your pages as small as possible. Tight HTML programming will need to be use to reduce file size. Your pictures and graphics will need to be compacted. For photos, you should use JPEG image formation and for your graphics, use GIF format.

Bandwidth can also be You can replace the file name in your <IMG SCC> tag with a URL that provides the location of an image you wish to use. Do not do link to this image on another website without permission. Another way to save bandwidth is to use the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is designed to reduce HTML file size by attributing values for any HTML command at the beginning of a document    

Designed to reduce HTML file size, CSS attribute values for any HTML element/command at the beginning of the document, instead of repeating them throughout the whole document.

Typically, the average personal or small business website does not need more than 1GB of bandwidth each month. It is best to estimate your bandwidth usage because some hosting companies charge you over usage fees if you exceed the amount of bandwidth included in your hosting package.

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