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What is bandwidth and what is data transfer?
Find out how bandwidth can impact your website and how to calculate your website hosting requirements.

If you've been shopping around for a new website host provider, you've probably seen many sites that offer bandwidth and data transfer. But, what is the difference between web hosting bandwidth and data transfer?

Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time. While, data transfer is how much data is being transferred.

The best way to understand bandwidth is through the following analogy: If bandwidth were an overpass, then the larger the causeway the more vehicles can pass and access the the overpass. Alternatively, data transfer is the number of vehicles allowed on the overpass in a given period of time. Fundamentally, data transfer is the utilization of bandwidth.

How Bandwidth Impacts Your Website

The less bandwidth your site has, the slower your site takes to load regardless of the number of visitor and connection type. If your site has more visitors, they will have to wait their chance to access your site. The less data transfer you have, the more often you'll find your site unavailable because it has reached the maximum usages of data allowed until a new month rolls by or your account has been upgraded.

Calculating Your Website Hosting Requirements

Generally, when a web hosting provider refers to bandwidth, they are referring to the transfer of data. To calculate the sufficient amount of data needed to make your site function, you'll need to gather some information. If you already have a site, the information is available from your traffic history. If you don't have a hosted website, you will need to calculate the needed storage and bandwidth to

Find out the daily averages of:

Page size including the graphics of the web page
Number of visitors or expected number of visitors
The number of page views or forecasted pages to be viewed by each visitor.

Next, calculate the following numbers:
Visitors x Page size x Page views x 30 days = Monthly Website Transfer.

Add in a small margin or error there to account for email traffic and uploads to the server.

If your website will offer downloads, then add the following:
Average/Expected downloads x File Size x 30 days = Monthly Download Transfer.

About Unlimited Web Hosting Bandwidth Plans

While bandwidth is very expensive, web host providers are limited in their allocations. When each visitor accesses your site, it's similar to the overpass analogy. You are given a smaller access point to transfer data. It creates many small access points. As a result, the more visitors your site has, the longer your visitor will have to wait for the web page to load.

Prevalently, there is little choice over bandwidth because your web host provider controls the transfer of data on your site. Conversely, certain hosting companies may limit the number of simultaneous connections (throttling) and it can slowdown your site - even shutting some visitors. Prior to selecting a new web hosting company, inquire how the hositng company controls bandwidth usage. To prevent the "throttling" purchase a package with more data transfer.

Prevent Excessive Website Transfers

To prevent transfer interruption, you can reduce your transfer amount by building a more efficient websites by optimizing your graphics and simplify the structure of your site. Avoid flash presentations or streaming audio (both are not readable in search engine queries). Remove white space, unwanted tags, and comments. Limit your website's META tags. Using excessive keywords is not search engine friendly. Moreover, search engines will review the first few and ignore the rest. Instead of embedding JavaScripts internally (CSS), use JavaScript externally.

Finally, to makes sure that your website is cached properly, set an expiration date in the HTTP headers so the browser will refresh the content after a specified time. Utilize robots.txt to keep spiders in check and prevent out of control robots from draining your bandwidth.