Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Data Transfer and Bandwidth - What to Know and Why they are Important

By Hitch Hiker


Beginners to the world of website hosting or ownership may be confused when they see the terms bandwidth and data transfer. If you already own a site or have hosted one you are probably familiar with the terms and what they mean. Those who are not however, may be confused as to why they are important and why website providers advertise using these terms.

When you are talking about bandwidth, you are discussing the network or server you are using and its capacity to send data within a specified period. Usually the measurement is done through a calculation of the amount of data sent in one second. The importance of this number is that it determines the amount of traffic that your website can handle. The higher the number the faster the pages load and more people can view those pages at any given time.

There are two separate calculations for bandwidth. The first is the rate at, which data can be received. The second calculation is the rate at, which data can be sent. It is desirable to have a received data, download rate greater than the send, or upload data rate.

When you are referring to data transfer this is the amount of data that is sent or transferred to the server over a specified amount of time. For example, most companies use a monthly transfer rate. If the transfer rate is 1GB then the website can only handle transferring data up to that amount each month.

Here is an example of how data transfer is calculated. You first take the size of your webpage. For example, if your webpage is 100KBs in size and it is viewed 100 times this means that you will have used 10MBs worth of data transfer. This is why it is important to minimize the size of your web pages. Many companies will either shut down a site or charge for exceeding data transfer limits. There are several ways that you can minimize the size of your pages.

With the evolution of online media and technology websites can now contain everything from plain text and pictures to music and videos. Everything these days can be downloaded and all these options affect bandwidth and data transfer rates. If you are going to use any type of media such as pictures give visitors the option to download files and use the smallest sized format possible for the website. This will allow your visitors to have the rich content you want without going over your limits.

Web hosting plans come in a variety of sizes. The reason for this is to allow business owners, website developers and hosts to choose an account size that is going to fit with the number of visitors they are anticipating. If you are anticipating, a large quality of visitors then choosing a webhosting plan that has high bandwidth and data transfer amounts should be an account to consider. This is why these two features are important when starting an online business, considering a change in web hosts, building a website or hosting websites for other people.




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