Bandwidth and Web Page Hosting

A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Teresa Williams

Bandwidth and web page hosting

When your designed pages are ready to go online, you will need a web page hosting company. The hosting company will provide disk space, or storage space for the files included in your web pages. Also included in hosting is bandwidth which is the space available to be able to transfer those stored files to the browser of anyone who wants to visit your site.

Bandwidth further explained:

The web page files that are stored on the hosting company's server need a way to be accessed by your visitors. When the visitor types the web address into their browser's address bar, their browser will connect to the host's server where your files are stored. Then the server will transfer those files to the browser that is asking to view the pages that contain those files. How large those files are will determine the amount of bandwidth you will need when searching for web page hosting companies.

To illustrate further, let's say that the home page on your site is 20KB. Whenever someone types your domain name in the address bar to access your site, and the browser takes them to that page, your hosting bandwidth is being used. 20KB of bandwidth. If you have 10 web pages on your site, each at about 20KB, then you have 200KB total file size (20KB of data x 10 pages). Then if ten people visit your site and access those pages, your hosting bandwidth is being used. 200KB per visitor. With ten visitors @ 200KB per visitor, that will be 2000KB or about 2MB of bandwidth used.

What happens to my web page hosting if I use all my available bandwidth?

Hosting companies deal with bandwidth overages in various ways. If you are out of bandwidth and a customer tries to visit your site, they won't be able to. You have no transfer space left, so the host's server won't transfer the files to the visitor's browser. In other words, no one will be able to visit your website.

Most of the time, the hosting company will let you know when you are getting close to your bandwidth limit. Then you have the option of buying more bandwidth, to insure that no one is turned away from your website.

If you run low on bandwidth, you should get an upgraded hosting package that will include more bandwidth. Don't take the chance of a potential customer not being able to access your site.

Consider the upside to having to pay more for your web page hosting.

So you have to buy more bandwidth. This is not always a bad thing. As long as your pages are kept at a reasonable size, without a lot of streaming audio or video clips, then using more bandwidth means that you are getting a lot of visitors. Which means potential customers. Depending upon the business you're in, one new customer, or one sale, can cover the cost of the upgraded bandwidth.