What is bandwidth and data transfer?

It is quite often to see Bandwidth and Data Transfer been used synonymously on the internet, especially on web hosting plans. However, there is quite a difference between these two terms technically. Bandwidth is a measurement of the data transfer rate over a medium (network). Your site will load faster if you have more bandwidth. On the other hand, Data Transfer is the traffic generated (or amount of data transferred) from a site. The amount of data transferred will depend on the number of visitors to the site and the file sizes of web pages (including multimedia files).

In web hosting, the least data transfer you have, the more often you'll find your site unavailable because you're reached the maximum allowed until a new month rolls by or you upgrade your account.

Calculate Your Monthly Data Transfer

If you have a popular site, please get ready to calculate the required monthly data transfer.

Monthly Data Transfer = (Visitors per Day x Average Page Size x Page Views x 30 days) + (Average Downloads x File Size x 30 days)

Data transfer is measured in bytes, kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB). If a website delivers 100,000 pages each month with average page file size of 20 KB, the data transfer per month will be 2GB. Hence, 20GB Data Transfer will be sufficient for 1,000,000 page views a month and translates to about 20,000 unique visitors per day. In fact, almost 80% of websites on the internet uses less than 5GB of data transfer per month. Data Transfer limit given by us is far higher than 5GB, and hence our customers normally need not to worry about it in most situation.

What is disk space and how much do I need?

In web hosting lingo, “disk space or storage size” refers to the amount of hard disk space the hosting company offers for your web pages. All your documents, graphics, animations, etc. all must fit into this space storage space.

50GB is a lot of disk space. When building your website, you will see that all the files for it must be connected – both image and audio files. In order for the site to load quickly, they should all be present in the same folder and in the same hosting server. And here is where the disk space comes – this is where you store all of your files. However, besides the space occupied by all the web files, such as media files (images – JPG, PNG, GIF), audio files and files containing the web page's content, there are several hidden files. Such files are the database files – they are in charge of keeping vital information for your website. If you are running a blog, for example, all of your blog posts and comments will be kept and organized in a database. This is why, when creating a website on your local computer and deciding how much disk space you need, you should always leave as much space as your site is currently using for both future expansion and hidden files.

What is "normal" usage?

Normal usage means that you operate a personal or small business website that utilizes resources in a manner similar to most of our other customers. For example, the system requirements of large corporations are not equal to those of small businesses and their resource requirements would not be considered normal for our architecture. Another example would be the storage of large numbers of video or audio files that may be associated with a site, but require more resources to support than a normal personal or business website would.