Essential Web Hosting Features - Bandwidth
In the previous article, I discussed disk space and some of its aspects you should pay attention to. Next on the list of core web hosting features is bandwidth. It would’ve been so much easier if #bandwidth was just the width of all members of your favorite band standing next to each other, right?
Well, not quite.
The concept of bandwidth in web hosting is not complicated at all. In simplest words, bandwidth determines how much data can be transferred between your site and your site’s visitors in a specified timeframe.
If you don’t have enough bandwidth, your website will have slow loading times, and some visitors won’t be able to access your website.
How Much Bandwidth Do I Need?
Calculating how much bandwidth you need is fairly simple. You need the following parameters:
- The number of visitors your website has per month
- The average number of pageviews (one user can view 5 different pages, which would then count as 5 pageviews) and
- The average size of your web pages.
Multiply all these parameters, and you’ll have a clear picture of the amount of bandwidth your website needs.
Web hosts offer plans that include limited or unlimited bandwidth, with the former being easier to compare to your website’s requirements (using the equation above). Unlimited bandwidth, meanwhile, is a bit tricky.
Is Unlimited Bandwidth a Thing?
First, let’s address the elephant in the room - unlimited bandwidth is a marketing term, and it doesn’t exist.
(Shared) web hosting companies will often advertise unlimited bandwidth as one of the perks of creating an account with them, but in reality, you will get limited bandwidth. In other words, the bandwidth amount won’t be limited, but other aspects of hosting will. The most common limitation is system resources. If your website uses a quarter of a web host’s system resources for more than a minute, for example, it would violate the rules of reasonable usage. You will most likely be notified of the excessive resource usage and asked to upgrade your plan or decrease the resource usage.
What you should take away from this is to always check the bandwidth limitations.
Meanwhile, a good web host will also recommend a hosting plan for a specific type of website. For example, Hostgator.com indicates that its highest-tier shared hosting plan should accommodate the needs of a personal or small website. If you have a growing website, you should pay attention to your bandwidth usage. Some of the most common ways to decrease bandwidth usage include:
- Compress images on your site
- Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTTP files
- Upload videos to a video-sharing platform and embed the code on your website.
If your website is data-heavy, and its audience is growing rapidly, instead of shared web hosting, you could give cloud, dedicated, or VPS hosting a try.