Bandwidth Offerings of Web Hosting Companies

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One of the most confusing concepts that the web hosting industry has to offer is bandwidth. Although small businesses looking for a web hosting might not think bandwidth is a big enough deal to spend hours researching it, bandwidth has the ability to either make or break any website. It affects the speed of your site, the reliability and uptime of the site, and even the professionalism of the website. There are thousands of web hosting companies around the world offering anywhere from megabytes to terabytes of bandwidth from hundreds of different providers. When choosing a web host for your site, it is extremely important to find one with the perfect amount of bandwidth and the best providers.

For most personal or small business sites that are opening up a website for the first time, not a lot of bandwidth will be needed. Whereas for large business and corporation websites, or sites that focus on file mirroring, hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes of high quality bandwidth might be needed. The simple way to figure out how much bandwidth you will need to run your site is to calculate the size of each page your website, usually in kilobytes, and multiply it by how many users you expect to access that page each month. 99% of web hosting companies give you monthly allotments of bandwidth whether you pay monthly or annually. However, it is always a good idea to make sure you know whether your host gives you monthly or yearly allotments of bandwidth. Pretend you want to start up a one page website that has a 100k file size. And you estimate that you will receive 10,000 hits per month. By multiplying these two values together, you will need to buy a web host with 1000000k or 1000mb or 1GB. But remember, if you plan to have a multi page website, the bandwidth usage will be a lot higher than this. File mirroring sites use the most bandwidth because their main purpose is to transfer rather large files to thousands of users worldwide.

All bandwidth providers have different prices, which in turn affect the prices that the datacenters and web hosting companies charge their clients. The normal prices can go anywhere from 10 cents to 50 dollars per gigabyte of bandwidth. However, the normal web hosting prices usually range from $1-$2 per gigabyte. The more that you pay per gigabyte usually reflects the quality of the bandwidth and the uptime that you will receive from your web host. If you are purchasing a dedicated server you might come across the tern megabit. Don’t be fooled, a megabit is quite different from a megabyte.

A megabit means that you can transfer at a speed of one megabyte per second constantly. This comes out to about 324 gigabytes per month of transfer. You might also see 32kbs, 64kbs, 128kbs, or anything like that advertised, meaning that you can transfer at 32 kilobytes per minute constantly, etc.

One thing that you will want to watch out for when selecting a web host is the additional fee that is charged when you go over your bandwidth limit. If you see a high fee as compared to the cost of the initial bandwidth allotment, it usually means one of two things. First, it could mean that the company might be overselling, which means that they are promising people more bandwidth than they have the ability to sell for that price. They assume that if someone goes over the bandwidth limit then they will make the money back by charging them higher rates for overages. The second thing that it could mean is simply that they want to make more money by charging a high fee on overages.

As seen on: UpperHost