Webmaster Resources: Bandwidth or Data Transfer – Which is Which?

Summary : Often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the same breath. In truth, they are different, although closely related, things.

Often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the same breath. In truth, they are different, although closely related, things. Bandwidth refers to how much data can be transferred at a time. Data transfer is how much data is actually transferred. Think of bandwidth as transfer capacity, and data transfer is the consumption of bandwidth. If bandwidth were a bridge, then the bigger the bridge, the more vehicles can pass through it. Data transfer, on the other hand, is the number of vehicles allowed on the bridge over a certain time.

As a webmaster, it is important to understand what hosting resources are available, and match them with your site's needs. The following is an overview of this web master resource :

How It Affects Your Site

The less bandwidth you have, the slower your site loads, regardless of the visitor's connection type. If you have more visitors, some of them will have to wait their turn. The smaller the amount of available data transfer, the more often you're your site is unavailable. This happens because the limit has been reached until a new month rolls by, or your hosting account is upgraded.

Determining Your Requirements

Usually when a host talks about bandwidth, they are referring to your transfer. Every webmaster must figure out how much is required for their site to function. You'll need to gather some information; fairly easy if you already have a site. Most is available from your traffic history. If you don't have an existing site, provide an optimistic estimate if you intend to heavily promote the site, then get ready for some math.

Find the daily averages of :

• Number of visitors / expected number of visitors
• Page size including the graphics of the page
• Page views / expected pages viewed by each visitor

Then, multiply them as follows:

• Visitors x Page size x Page views x 30 days = Monthly Website Transfer

You should also include a small margin of error to take into account email traffic and your own uploads to the server. If you offer downloads, then also add the following:

• Average/Expected downloads x File Size x 30 days = Monthly Download Transfer

Unlimited Plans

Bandwidth is very expensive. All web hosts are limited by their own allocations. Thinking back to the bridge example, each visitor will be given a smaller lane to transfer the data, creating many tiny lanes. The more visitors you have, the smaller each lane becomes, making each visitor wait for the page to load.

More often than not, there is little choice over your bandwidth. Your web hosting provider controls this. Some hosts may limit the number of simultaneous connections, in effect slowing down your site and refusing some visitors. This is called throttling. If you're concerned about this, you should ask the host how they control bandwidth usage, or purchase a package with more data transfer. If you use HostVoice.net (link:http://hostvoice.net), this information is easily obtainable with one request.

Reducing Transfers

On the other hand, you can reduce your transfer amount with simpler, more efficient web design, and optimizing your graphics. Refrain from fancy Flash presentations or streaming audio. Use CSS, and call JavaScript externally instead of embedding in every page. Remove unwanted tags, white space and comments in your code. Limit your META tags to those absolutely necessary. We all know using keywords is part of search engine optimization, but citing too many has the opposite effect. Many search engines only review the first few, and ignore the rest.

Another good webmastering technique to control bandwidth use is to cache your website. You can set an expiration date in the HTTP headers forcing browsers to refresh the page after a set time. Use mod-gzip. It could save you as much as 40% of your bandwidth. Out of control robots can also suck down your bandwidth like a black hole. So use robots.txt to keep spiders in check.

About the Author : This article has been contributed by the team at HostVoice.net