Before I go into explaining the impact of having a high bandwidth or a low bandwidth for your business, I will take a little moment to explain what Bandwidth is and why you must take it seriously when choosing a website hosting company or infrastructure for your business.
Understanding Bandwidth
Bandwidth can be referred to as the maximum amount of data transmitted over an internet connection in a given amount of time. For instance, if you transmit or transfer 100MB of data from your server to your website visitors every 1second, the total amount of bandwidth you transfer is 100Mbps. This means that you would be needing a server host that can offer you at least 120Mbps of bandwidth. The extra 20Mbps is to enable you to have more resources to stay in business by reducing downtime and slow website loading.
Most people mistake bandwidth for speed over the internet when it’s actually the volume of information or data that can be sent/transmitted over a connection in a measured amount of time which is calculated in megabits per second (Mbps).
The Importance of Bandwidth
As we have highlighted the fact that Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred or downloaded from a website by the website visitors from the website server, there are some major factors that increase in direct proportion to the amount of bandwidth being utilized. These factors determine the amount of bandwidth a website needs and will need over the years.
- Speed of the networks
- Network connections
- Applications running on a hosting center’s server
The amount of bandwidth you have determines how quickly your website can deliver content to your visitors during peak traffic times. It is a vital part of growing your audience and increasing your sales. Therefore, must be taken seriously.
Getting a High Bandwidth for your Business
A website that does more HD video streamings, downloads large files, and deploys multiplayer gaming, may want to consider speed plans of 100 Mbps and above requires more bandwidth. For all other activities like streaming music, surfing, and video conferencing, such a website might want anything above 25 Mbps. This means that Bandwidth in the right sense plays a vital role in the enhancement of website speed.
Unlimited, Metered/Unmetered Bandwidth
It would interest you to know that both Unlimited and Unmetered Bandwidth are not the same as they keep confusing those who care less about it. Some hosting companies promise an unlimited bandwidth system, but is that real? We all know that Bandwith is a measure or amount of data transferred over a given time. This means that the transfer of data over a given time can not be limitless therefore, Unlimited Bandwidth does not exist. Instead, Unmetered Bandwidth. It is very clear that we love anything that sounds unlimited but any hosting company promising you Unlimited Bandwidth should be looked at twice and be very careful of such a host. It definitely would be giving you issues in a short while.
Unmetered Bandwidth on the other hand gives you access to use the hosting bandwidth at will but it is being monitored by the host. This means that you will be capped on a maximum level of bandwidth to use which the host believes you will not exhaust. While on the other hand, Metered Bandwidth specifies the exact amount you are allowed to use.
Bazecity Media provides you with both Metered and Unmetered Bandwidth as required by your business. Just because it’s unnecessary to pay for more bandwidth than you need, not having enough can cause your website to go offline as well. Therefore, Bazecity can stand between the gap to determine what you need and what will work well for your business.
If your site is new, or you don’t have a lot of content/visitors, then you won’t need to have a large amount of bandwidth. But, if your website already has a large number of users and you have a lot of graphics, images, video, audio, downloadable content, and visitors, then you’ll need more bandwidth.
Making the Best Choice of Bandwidth for your Business
What are the growth plans of a company? Companies looking to expand within the next couple of years are advised to opt for higher bandwidth packages to accommodate further growth spurts without incurring additional costs or suffering downtime.
Companies with fewer than 500,000 visitors a year are not likely to need increasing bandwidth availability. For larger businesses, understanding the correlation between high bandwidth hosting and page load speed is the key to choosing a web hosting provider that will efficiently meet a customer’s needs.
Beware of hosting services offering “Unlimited Bandwidth” options. For many businesses, this is simply unnecessary and unrealistic.
