What are bandwidth and diskspace?
When you begin to make the decision which is the best type of hosting package for your needs and have identified who may be your perfect webhost, the next and vital stage to wrap up your search is to ascertain how much bandwidth and disk space you will need for your web site. Many people get confused and arrive at the conclusion that bandwidth and diskspace are the same thing when in actual fact they are completely different. If you have a small website to host, and don’t anticipate a lot of traffic then these issues are not of primary importance to you. However if you intend to build a large website and need to be able to handle a lot of web traffic then it is important to take a few minutes to learn the difference between these two highly important factors in web hosting.
First of all, you should be aware of the fact that all the serious web hosting companies have trillions of megabytes of storage space, which may be allocated amongst hundreds of computerized storage units or servers. These are gathered together in a specific storage center known as a data center. Data centers are staffed 24/7 by highly trained computer experts, overseeing the most up to date equipment, including generators and battery back ups in case the power source collapses. Anyone who has ever visited a data center will recall the controlled humidity and temperature facilities in action around the clock to reduce the possibility of breakdowns.
Many people consider that having ample amounts of disk space is the most important feature in keeping your web site optimized to the maximum. In actual fact having sufficient bandwidth is much more important as if potential customers cannot access your web site because you have passed your daily, weekly or monthly quota of bandwidth, then you will have more or less likely lost some income. When you reach an agreement with a hosting company, you will decide on and be allocated with a certain amount of bandwidth traffic, usually on a monthly basis. Bandwidth, in the simplest of technical terms, describes the optimal amount of actual data that can be transferred to potential customer’s browsers from your web site’s servers. If you have agreed on a monthly quota and you go over that quota, there is a strong chance that visitors to your web site will be unable to access your web site. A more likely chance is that your hosting company will hit you with a considerable surcharge for unauthorized use of bandwidth. Most competent web hosting companies don’t have vast amounts of bandwidth to spare, so if you constantly go over your limits, it may begin to affect other clients and cause a knock on effect that might cause the entire server to fall. It is always advisable in the early days of hosting a web site, especially one where it is difficult to assess the extent of initial traffic, to check your web traffic statistics page daily and see how the actual traffic matches your estimates. If it looks like the web traffic is liable to exceed the anticipated traffic by a long way, it might well be worth your while to take a calculated risk and raise the amount of bandwidth you will require from your web server.
A criteria to be used when calculating the amount of bandwidth you should reasonably require for your web site is the nature of its content. If you have a simple web site, possibly Google orientated, you shouldn’t really need a tremendous amount of bandwidth, no more than 2 gigabytes (2,000 megabytes) per month. However if your web site contains a lot of downloadable material, from photographs, to software, from music to videos, you should be prepared to pay for between 25 to 100 times that amount of bandwidth.
In a web site, the terminology bandwidth relates to all download and upload activity. A web site with 100 pages each containing one half a megabyte of downloadable material, on the optimistic assumption that the visitor will browse every page, should theoretically need 50 megabyte of bandwidth per visitor, and it would take only 40 visitors a month to use up all the bandwidth anticipated. In the real World however it rarely works out that way and in actual fact there may be 500 visitors, maybe scanning one or two pages at the most. That is why every web site owner should keep their finger on the pulse of visitor’s statistics over the first few months of the web site’s life to keep track of how the traffic is developing.
After all the calculation involved in estimating how much bandwidth you will need for your web site, the matter of calculating the amount of disc space you will require is much more straightforward. Basically all that is required is to add up all the text, graphic and media material included on the web pages that you have uploaded to your web site. Your hosting company should be able to provide this. And average website of 10 pages with each page containing 500 kilobytes of material will amount to no more than 5 megabytes in total. All the webmaster needs to remember is that if the upload material which will dramatically increase the amount of disk space required should increase their allocation accordingly. The chances are that their hosting company will advise them in any event. In recent years the cost of web hosting has been reduced considerably, and it is now possible to host a simple web site for just a few dollars every month. These are the major differences between bandwidth and diskspace, seemingly insignificant but highly important.