What is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth, in this context, is the amount of traffic your site generates.
A person who downloads a 100K graphic from your site uses as much bandwidth
as a person who downloads 10 individual 10K graphics from your site.
Bandwidth is the most expensive part of providing web space - disk space
is cheap, servers cost a little more, housing the servers in secure locations
costs more still and bandwidth costs far more than the rest put together.
Many web hosting businesses sell you packages with a fixed amount of disk
space (usually ridiculously high unless you want to run a porn site or a
music site - a couple of megs is probably more than you'll need). With that
disk space also comes an allotment of bandwidth - some web hosting businesses
are up-front about the limits, others are vague or refuse to commit themselves,
but the limits are there.
If you want more bandwidth you usually have to buy more
disk space (which you don't need) to get the associated allocation of extra bandwidth.
Here is a table to help you convert between bits, bytes and gigabytes:
| K Bits per Second |
Megabytes per month |
Gigabytes per month |
| 64 |
20250 |
19.78 |
| 128 |
40500 |
39.55 |
| 256 |
81000 |
79.10 |
| 512 |
162000 |
158.20 |
| 1024 (1 megabit) |
324000 |
316.14 |
| 2048 (2 megabits) |
648000 |
632.81 |
Why "Unlimited" Bandwidth And Disk Space Is A Bad Idea
Any company offering "unlimited" bandwidth and disk space is not
offering anything of the sort, as there is no such thing as unlimited
anything. What they really mean is that they won't tell you what level
of disk or bandwidth usage is unacceptable to them, and they might cut
off your web site without warning, or impose other onerous conditions
on your site without notice. You are advised to avoid any company offering
"unlimited" disk space or bandwidth.
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