Monday 4 June 2012

What are bandwidth and data transfer and how to calculate their usage per month?

If you are an internet savvy person then you might have read or heard web hosting providers talk very often about bandwidth and data transfer. However, if you are new to this internet industry and want to know what exactly is bandwidth and data transfer, how much is sufficient for your website and how does it affect your website. This article will tell everything you need to know about the bandwidth and data transfer.
First of all let me make it clear to you that bandwidth and data transfer are different from each other, I am telling you this very fact because you might have heard web hosting service providers talk about bandwidth and data transfer as the same entity. Now let me tell you what are bandwidth and data transfer.
  1. The term Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred in a given time period.
  2. The term Data Transfer refers to the actual amount of data transferred.
  3. The usage & the amount offered of both the Bandwidth and Data transfer is calculated per month by the web hosts.
To make it more clear and easy to understand let’s assume as if bandwidth were a highway, the bigger the highway the more vehicles can travel on it in a given time period. Whereas, Data transfer would then be the number of vehicles allowed to travel on that highway in a given time period.

How does it affect your website?
The less bandwidth you would take for your website, the more time will it take to load, regardless of the visitors’ connection type such as DSL or Dial UP. The visitors will have to wait for their turn to view and go through the website properly. And, the less data transfer you will have, the more often your website visitor will find your website as currently unavailable because by then your website would have reached the maximum amount of data allowed to be transferred.

How much do you need?
To know your exact bandwidth and data transfer requirement per month, you first need to either know the exact or approximate size of your website and the number of visitors your website would have in a month's time. Here, your goal must be to ensure that all the probable visitors can easily access your website with ease, therefore the criteria to determine the requirement per month should be:
  •  number of visitors anticipated per month.
  • average page size (including all text, images, flash files if any, and other files).
  • anticipated page views per visitor.
To make evaluating your requirements more easy we have created an easy to understand formula i.e., No. Visitors x Avg. Page Size x Page Views x 30 days = your monthly website data transfer
For example, your website has 10 pages, and each page contains text & images and let’s assume that the average page size of your website is 50KB and you anticipate 50 visitors per day, and each visitor will view all 10 pages available on your site.
Your monthly website data transfer would then be:
50 Visitors x 50KB x 10 Pages x 30 Days = 750,000KB or 0.733GB/month

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