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The bandwidth matter

The bandwidth matter

The first question which could be made is: what is bandwidth? Almost all hosting companies write with big font size about unlimited bandwidth per month, in their home pages, but what is the bandwidth and, above all, is it really so important?
The answer is simply "yes", because the bandwidth allowed for a website in a month is the max amount of data that can transit through the website in a month.
In fact, the more bandwidth/month a hosting company offers in a hosting plan, the more connections by internet surfers are allowed, if the other conditions are the same.
Having a big bandwidth for a given site gives the advantage of more users who can visit and navigate the site, even with heavy contents, like video files.
There are 2 important things to care of talking about bandwidth: the first is that unlimited bandwidth doesn't really exists, as well explained in another hosting article; the second is that the needings of high bandwidth are very different depending on the web site you are going to host. In fact, if the site hasn't too many visits/month and/or if the site doesn't offer too many heavy files like video files, even a low amount of bandwidth could be sufficient.
As an example about the bandwidth usage of a website, let consider a simple web site with a file of 100 MB hosted in it and available for download.
Now, if in a given month the site gets 20 visits and all these 20 site visitors download the file, the bandwidth spent for the download is of:
100 MB(dimension of the file) * 20(number of downloads) = 2000 MB = 2 GB (to be more precise 1 GB = 1024 MB).
At this amount of 2 GB, you will have to add other components of bandwidth usage, for every object in the website accessed by visitors, of course, and you have to count even the simple access to images (like jpgs, gifs and so on) and other basic objects which are accessed without any explicit download.