Understanding Bandwidth and How It Works

When choosing transfer storage space, there are several factors to take into consideration. Bandwidth is an important part of that consideration, so understanding it is crucial when trying to find a home for your website.

Bandwidth, by definition, is a fixed amount of data that can travel over the Internet during a set period of time. Put simply, it is the amount of data transferred from your website to another computer. The visitors you have, the more bandwidth you’ll need in order to deliver the information on your site to their computers. When information travels from one computer to another, it is timed in bits per second, or BPS for short. This includes the text, graphics and design you place on your website or see on the sites of others.

When you first sign up with a host, that is a company who will provide you the space where your site will reside, you will need to know how much space your site will use, how long a single web page will take to travel across the Internet, the size of the file you store for download, the amount of visitors you expect to receive in any given month and how much space you’ll need for delivery and receipt. The visitors you have are called your web traffic. The number of page views you expect are also factored in because you will likely have many people click on your site to see what it’s all about.

Though you may not be able to provide specific numbers, you can consult with someone at the host company who can help you figure out the amount of space you need. The bandwidth is crucial because you don’t want users to not be able to view your site because you do not have enough. The good news is, you can always expand the space you have and with it, the bandwidth.