The term bandwidth generally refers to the amount of data that is sent and received from your hosting services. In terms of billing, most hosting services provide a monthly bandwidth quota which is the maximum amount of bandwidth that you can use per month (regardless of billing cycle). In essence – bandwidth is the measurement of the data used to connect your hosting services to the internet.
So what actually makes up your bandwidth?
Well, in terms of standard website hosting, the following will contribute to the bandwidth that you use:
- Visitors to your website. Everytime someone visits your website, they need to download your page and any images on it. All of this contributes to the bandwidth used by your services.
- Emails. If your emails are hosted with HostGeek, and emails that are sent of received are counted towards your bandwidth quota.
How much bandwidth do you need?
Well, the exact amount of bandwidth required for hosting services varies significantly between different sites. Generally speaking, the more images and video on your website, and the more hits you get, the more bandwidth you will need. We generally recommend our customers start with at least 10GB of bandwidth – this gives you some room to grow as your website becomes more popular without incurring expensive additional costs.
As your website grows you may need to move to a plan with more bandwidth. You will be alerted by the HostGeek systems as you start to approach your bandwidth quota on a monthly basis to let you know it’s about time to consider and upgrade.
But my website doesn’t have any ‘downloads’ – how am I still using bandwidth?
As explained below, every time someone opens your website they are retrieving a copy of your website from the HostGeek servers – it is this information transfer that counts towards your bandwidth quota, not just files that are specifically downloaded.
How can I reduce the bandwidth that I use?
There are a number of things that can be done to reduce the amount of bandwidth that your website uses. Firstly, HostGeek enables by default for all shared hosting customer compression. This means that the content of your website is compressed by the server before it is sent to your visitors to reduce the amount of bandwidth used.
If you have a lot of images on your website, it pays to check that these are correctly sized and web optimised. If you are using a CMS system such as WordPress this may be done automatically for you. If not, your images may be significantly bigger then what they need to be, putting a drain on your bandwidth resources.
