The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second (bps) or bytes per second. For analog devices, the bandwidth is expressed in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz).
From the web hosting point of view, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between a web site and the rest of the internet for a particular server (or host). The amount of bandwidth a web hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their information center and external to the public internet.
Every time someone visits you web site or downloads something from your web site, a certain amount of bandwidth is consumed. Normally every website owner is allotted a specific quantity of bandwidth per month (or monthly limit) which is usually measured in GB.
If there are a lot of people trying to download from a single website or from different websites hosted on the same host, there may be occasions when somebody will be required to wait because the bandwidth limitation of the particular host is being used at full capacity.
Nowadays, we are seeing bigger and bigger websites with several thousand pages, plenty of audio, video and downloadable files which have led to a bandwidth explosion. Online gaming sites are very popular and require huge amounts of bandwidth. Multimedia sites in general require bigger bandwidth and will continue to do so. Plenty of research is going on all over the world to find methods of reducing bandwidth consumption, and at the same time, increase the available bandwidth.
To make a simple calculation of the bandwidth consumption, let's assume the following example. If you have put up a single page website which is 75KB in size and suppose ten people come to your site on an average every day, then your monthly bandwidth consumption will be =75*10*31 = 23,250KB or 23MB. But chances are you have a multi-page website, and so the average page size and average page views per day are to be used for calculation purposes. Not to mention your site probably includes images and offers downloads and so the bandwidth consumption increases.
Is bandwidth something that is available in abundance? The answer is NO. There are a lot of technical and practical limitations to this. One prominent factor being the limitations in the availability of telecommunication channels and infrastructure to carry this heavy traffic to various parts of the globe. Without a significant improvement on the infrastructure front, we can't expect to resolve the bandwidth problem soon enough.
About the Author
Russell Blanc is an expert in the web hosting field and president of http://www.iwebhostingplans.com, the ultimate resource for web hosting. |
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