When you choose the right web hosting plan for your needs, it helps to understand what the different options offer. One of the most important considerations of choosing a web host is the website bandwidth.
What is website bandwidth?
When we mention website bandwidth, we refer to how much data your website can serve your visitors within a specific period. So, the more people come to visit your website at one time, the more bandwidth your site needs to use to load simple web pages. As a result, websites with dynamic content and videos need even more bandwidth.
If your web hosting plan doesn’t provide enough website bandwidth, visitors to your website will experience a slow loading time, which could impact your website ranking on search engines. Generally, web servers can provide more than enough website bandwidth. However, if you choose shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting, you might have a more affordable hosting option, but you’ll be sharing the web server’s bandwidth capacity with the hundreds of other websites on that server. This could put a strain on the system, leaving your website suffering and your visitors frustrated.
How much bandwidth do you need?
The amount of website bandwidth necessary for a good visitor experience depends on the number of visitors to your site, the number of pages on your website, and the amount of rich content hosted on your site.
Sites with video and downloadable content will require much more website bandwidth than one that’s primarily text-based. Generally, shared hosting is efficient for small businesses sites and personal websites since they usually don’t require a lot of bandwidth. In addition, medium-sized organisations could opt for a virtual private server (VPS), which is still on a shared server with fewer users and blocked off from others, so their website bandwidth use doesn’t affect your site’s performance. However, larger corporations and media sites will need to invest in the power of dedicated web servers.
Some organisations may have a seasonal business, resulting in inconsistent website bandwidth use. For these companies, cloud hosting may be a good option. These hosting plans allow you to increase or decrease your website bandwidth based on what you need, and you only pay for the bandwidth you use.
The advantages of having enough website bandwidth available include:
Adding rich content like videos and animations to your site.
Reduced likelihood that your site will crash.
More visitors returning and more pages viewed.
Exceeding your website bandwidth
If you’re concerned that your website may grow in size and popularity, resulting in you using more bandwidth, it’s worth talking to different web hosting providers to find out about their policies relating to sites that exceed the website bandwidth allocated to their plan.
Most providers allow for some leeway, and few will take your site offline immediately. Instead, they will contact you to discuss the issue and options to either reduce your website bandwidth use or upgrade to a more suitable plan.
Reducing your website bandwidth
If you don’t want to upgrade your hosting package, you can reduce your site’s bandwidth by compressing images and reducing the size of large videos or downloads on your site. In addition, you might also consider using a caching plugin to enable compression from HTTP, CSS, and JavaScript.
What about unlimited bandwidth?
Many hosting providers may promise “unlimited bandwidth” even on cheaper plans. However, this term is inaccurate since no web hosting provider can offer genuinely unlimited website bandwidth. Servers can only provide so much bandwidth.
On the other hand, web hosting plans that offer unmetered bandwidth doesn’t charge you based on how much bandwidth you use. However, if you exceed the website bandwidth their servers can handle based on your type of plan, they’ll get in touch to discuss your options.
Contact Hosting24 for details
When it comes to website bandwidth, you should more is better, but there’s no point in paying for it if you’re not going to use it. For assistance with selecting the right web hosting package for your budget and bandwidth needs, get in touch with Hosting24 today.