Although many factors are responsible for your website success, bandwidth is an important factor to consider. If you have more bandwidth allocated for your website, you can handle more traffic to your site. Whether you are opting for a Linux web hosting or Windows web hosting plans, first you need consider the bandwidth offered by the hosting providers. It is important because it affects the websites performance and traffic.

What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the amount of data allowed to transfer through a network at a given time. It normally denotes the data transmission capacity of a network or connection. The unit for measurement is Bits/Bytes per Second [Bps]. Normally a full page of word document is having about sixteen thousand bits. Video files, flash and graphics file has more bandwidth usage than plain text. Website hosting providers normally calculate the usage and bill their clients for excessive data transfer.

How much bandwidth needed?

You can estimate the bandwidth requirement by roughly calculating the webpage size multiplied by number of pages and then number of visitors. Take for instance that your webpage has 30K of images and 2k of HTML files, then the total size of your webpage is 32k or in other words, your webpage is having 32k of data. Now, multiply it by expected number of visitors for your domain per month. For example, if you expect one hundred thousand visitors, then [32*100000=3.2G] you might require 3.2G of data transfer/bandwidth usage. In the same way, you can calculate for all the web pages and determine the bandwidth requirement.

How can I save bandwidth?

Optimizing your bandwidth usage helps you in reducing the bandwidth consumption and server load, there by increasing the performance of your website. Images and graphic files in your webpage generally consume more bandwidth than text. Reducing the file size of the images by changing the format and back-linking image files, will help you to minimize the page size. Using cascading style sheet [CSS], for creating WebPages also helps in reducing the file size.

Many hosting companies are now offering unlimited bandwidth plans for their customers. For less than five dollars per month, you can get unlimited plans from various cheap web-hosting providers.

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