Do You Need A Lot Of Bandwidth?

The term bandwidth is often a measure of how fast is your web browsing experience when doing something in the Internet. If the data’s direction is from your computer and going out somewhere out in the Internet, this is called outbound data. If the data’s direction if somewhere from the Internet and going into your computer, this is called inbound data. Popular websites require a lot of bandwidth and if the bandwidth cannot handle the page requests the website will crash and the users cannot access the website.

When your web page is accessed, there is an amount of inbound data that travels from the web hosting’s web server into the user’s computer. When you write a blog into your website, there is an outbound data going out from your personal computer and into the web hosting’s web server and this will eat some space in the server’s hard disk. This will be something of a consideration when choosing your web hosting plans. Consider the size of storage space in the hard disk and the speed of data transmission.

Marketing ploys nowadays will try to misused certain terms to mislead customers. While these kinds of advertisements can be supported by web hosting companies as true when rigorously verified based on the hosting company’s own definitions of certain terms, your own understanding of a certain term might not be what the hosting company is trying to say. When you want to have a certain feature, make sure that both you and the web hosting service have the same understanding of the term for that feature and its exact meaning. This will save you from regrets later.

Let us take for example this most popular web hosting gimmicks nowadays, the term ‘unlimited bandwidth’. The web hosting’s terms of service may have stated in a certain paragraph what it means to have ‘unlimited bandwidth’. One actual example could be that, this means an unlimited access to your websites for until you keep on paying the monthly dues and does not mean an unlimited speed.

It just meant, unlimited access. Or the hosting company have their own definition that an unlimited bandwidth is actually 100MB of total data bandwidth per month.

According to the physicist Albert Einstein, there are only two things in this universe that are unlimited, and that he is not entirely sure of the first one:

1)the size of the universe

2)human stupidity. By an application of a little common sense, the offering of an ‘unlimited bandwidth’ would mean unlimited resources in terms of hard disks and network cables or CPU power. Even the speed of light already has its limit of 299,792,458 meters per second. Could it be possible that these web hosting companies have broken the speed of light?

I don’t think so. But I don’t blame these web hosting companies for coming up with these trick because not all websites behave alike and there could be certain site that went suddenly popular for a brief moment eating up all of their resources, crashing their servers and bringing down all the other websites within that server into darkness.

Some web hosting also allows unlimited data storage. But when you read their terms of service, they don’t allow you the storage of certain file types like video, mp3, or huge images. Indeed, there is an unlimited data storage but of text files only! To give you an idea, the Old and New Testament of the Bible combined together has only 774,746 text words. Therefore, clarify with the web hosting terms of agreement what valid files are allowed.

Once you have uploaded your website, observe carefully your website’s performance in its first few months. This should give you an idea as a reference comparison later.

If you will host video files, or virtual reality type of web page, compute an estimate bandwidth for a decent performance. Your own testing may not be accurate but at least you have your own data and this shows that you know your website’s requirements.

In summary, knowledge is power and you should do your own research. Know your own web site’s requirements, and know what the hosting company has to offer.

A good match between these two will result in a beautiful website that is available 24/7/365. It will be the work of art that you have conceived it to
be.