The majority of hosting companies have a choice of bandwidth options in their plans. So, what exactly is bandwidth in the context of web hosting? In simple terms, bandwidth is the amount of traffic allowed between your website and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is controlled by their network connection, both inside and outside their data center.
Network Connectivity
In its most basic form, the Internet is a network that connects millions of computers. These internet connections can be quite large or small, depending on the cabling and equipment used at a particular internet address.
The amount of bandwidth available is determined by the size of each network connection. For example, if you connect to the Internet using DSL, you have a bandwidth of 1.54 Megabits (Mb). As a result, bandwidth is measured in bits (one number 0 or 1). Bits are organized into bytes, which consist of words, text, and other data transmitted between your computer and the internet.
If you have a DSL internet connection, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet service provider. Your internet service provider, on the other hand, may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connections are combined on your internet service provider, who then have their dedicated internet connection (or multiple connections) that are significantly larger than your single connection.
They should have adequate bandwidth to meet your processing needs as well as the demands of all their other clients. So, even if you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet, which allows it to meet your needs as well as the needs of up to 166 additional subscribers (255/1.54).
Traffic
Think of highways and cars as simple comparisons to understand bandwidth and traffic. The number of lanes on the highway is represented by bandwidth, while the number of cars on the highway is represented by traffic. You can go pretty fast if you’re the only car on the highway. If you’re stuck during rush hour, you might go very slowly because all lanes are full.
Traffic is the number of bits transferred on a network connection. It is easiest to understand traffic by using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the power of 30 (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1, 024 megabytes. To give you an idea, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 filing cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters – One GB is all the characters present in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB in size, the same song in wav format is about 40MB in size, and a full-length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).
If you transfer these MP3 songs from a website to your computer, you will create 4MB of traffic between the website you are downloading from and your computer. Depending on the network connection between the website and the internet, the transfer can happen very quickly, or it can be time-consuming if other people are also downloading files at the same time.
If the website you are downloading from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing the website to download MP3s, then your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that website. However, if three people download the same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic is created. Since in this example, the host only has 10MB bandwidth, one has to wait.
The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person who downloads the file and transfer a small portion at a time so that everyone’s file transfer can be done, but the transfer for everyone who downloads the file will be slower. If 100 people come to the site and download MP3s at the same time, the transfer will be very slow.
If web owners want to reduce the time it takes to download files simultaneously, they can increase the bandwidth of their internet connection, at a higher cost due to equipment upgrades.