Know your bandwidth

Bandwidth is an important measure that will affect the total cost that you incur on your website.

Know your bandwidth

Bandwidth is an important measure that will affect the total cost that you incur on your website. Knowing your bandwidth details can help you provide the best service to your visitors at the lowest cost. If you are not aware of these considerations or just don’t care, you could end up spending a lot more money on your site without any real value addition.

What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth is commonly used to refer to the amount of data that you transfer form and to your site. Every time someone visits your site, such person is downloading your homepage from your host computer. From the homepage, your visitor may then navigate to other pages, and each page adds to the total count of kilobytes that the person downloads, adding to your “bandwidth”.

Why control bandwidth?

Usually web hosting companies offer you some free bandwidth, and charge you extra for any additional bandwidth that you consume. The free bandwidth that you get is based on your choice at the time of signing up. The catch here is that if you underestimate your bandwidth requirement and sign up for a lower bandwidth, and subsequently consume more, your unit cost for the extra consumption will be much higher than the average contracted rate. The hosting companies are right in adopting this policy as contracting a particular figure helps them to plan their affairs better than catering to ad hoc requests. However, you as a customer stand to lose with this approach because if you contract for a higher bandwidth and then consume much less you are unnecessarily paying for what you have not consumed. At the same time, if you contract for a lower figure and then consume more, you are going to pay more for every additional unit that you consume. It becomes necessary to estimate your bandwidth requirement in advance as accurately as possible. Abcdesigning through their hosting company hostinfo.co.uk provides a range of hosting plans with varied allowed bandwidth.

Estimating bandwidth requirement

There are three variables that affect the bandwidth that you actually consume. The first is the number of visitors who visit your site. The second is the size of each page in your site, and the third is the number and type of pages that your visitors see. It is evident that you cannot estimate with accuracy the number of visitors who will visit your site. As time goes on, you may be able to make some analysis and make intelligent guesses. To start with, you will have to make some wild guesses. The only help that you can possibly get is form the experience of other similar sites if you can get such information easily.

The third item, namely the number and nature of the pages that your visitors will load, is equally difficult to determine, but you can make better guesses than in the case of the total number of visitors, based on assumptions about the type of visitors that you expect. When it comes to the second item, however, you can both estimate it with a fairly good degree of accuracy, and also control it.

You can easily ascertain the size of each web page that you create from its properties, or by displaying the details in Windows Explorer or an equivalent facility of the operating system that you use. More importantly, you can optimize the page size by planning it more carefully. Remember that graphics, animation, multimedia and the like increase the size of your pages. Unless these are really adding value to your pages, they should be avoided. Never use then for cosmetic purposes.

Monitoring Bandwidth

Almost every website hosting company gives you a tool that shows you the actual consumption of bandwidth from your site. You should use this facility to constantly monitor the actual bandwidth consumption. This will help you in planning for the future and also understand the pattern of consumption. This can also help you to review the design of your site and the individual pages that make it, and take steps to optimize them.