Why Do Companies Need Unlimited Bandwidth?
Companies with extensive bandwidth needs might require unlimited bandwidth. But what is unlimited bandwidth and how do you know when it’s time for your company to increase your bandwidth requirements? This article discusses what bandwidth is and how it can affect your relationship with your customer and team.
Whether you have a dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth or you use a high-performance VPS server for your needs, spikes in site usage can cause downtime for your site, in turn having detrimental effects on your customer relationship. Though larger, more frequently visited sites require unlimited bandwidth, if your site doesn’t experience significant traffic, you might not need to worry about your bandwidth capabilities.
Continue reading to learn more about unlimited bandwidth and what types of companies can benefit from using this feature the most.
What Does Bandwidth Mean?
Any time you see the term bandwidth in regards to hosting, it refers to the maximum amount of traffic you can have on your website. Whether your hosting company offers unlimited bandwidth or has a cap on the bandwidth that you can use each month, they will keep track of the data you use. Many things can impact the amount of network bandwidth allocated to your website, including the following:
Number of Visitors
Every time your site hosts a visitor, your hosting company sends the page data to their browser to see it. For example, if your home page has 10 MB of data on it and 100 people visit your site, you would use 1Gb of bandwidth. Other factors can affect the actual amount of data you transfer.
Type of Data on Your Site
While (technically speaking) bandwidth is determined by the amount of data, not the type, it is important to think about what content is on your site. For example, images require much more bandwidth than text, and videos require far more than either.
Uploading and Downloading Files
Every time you use your hosting account for cloud storage, you wind up using bandwidth. For example, downloading a 1 MB file would use an estimated 1 MB of bandwidth.
Third-Party Hosting
If you host a 100 MB video on your site, you can serve it in a multitude of ways to your site visitors. If it is on the web hosting server, it will take up to 100 MB of bandwidth each time users download the file. However, if you embed it using a public platform, you won’t use any bandwidth.
Is Unlimited Bandwidth Attainable?
For most people starting a new website, the term unlimited bandwidth seems straightforward. It suggests that no matter how much traffic your website receives, your hosting option can handle it. But consumers should be advised to look into what unlimited bandwidth truly means before committing to a provider.
Unlimited bandwidth often implies the hosting company is not specifying an amount of bandwidth for your website. Thus, you should read the fine print before committing to a hosting provider. Most of these contracts include clauses that say something to the degree of being able to cancel your account if you use too much bandwidth.
When this occurs, hosting companies won’t immediately cancel your account because they want to keep your business for as long as they can. Instead of canceling your account, companies will notify you that your site uses more bandwidth than normal sites and expect you to upgrade to a more robust package.
Why Is Bandwidth Important?
Bandwidth is critical to companies’ success for a few reasons. Factors such as site loading speeds, the load on the webserver, and data backup demonstrate why bandwidth can either make or break a company’s web presence.
- Site Loading Times- The most obvious reason to value bandwidth is that it has a direct influence on how fast your site loads for users. The more data being transferred, the longer it will take for your page to fully load. Unlimited bandwidth eliminates this issue.
- Load on the Web Server- The server’s main function is to respond to various data requests from users about web data. If you send more data, you need more bandwidth and a more capable server.
- Data Backup- Sensitive data information needs a secure storage method in case of catastrophic data loss and cyberthreats. If you lose a lot of data on your site, you need more space for storing your backup files.
- With this in mind, you want to keep your used bandwidth at a minimum. You can accomplish this by compressing images, using catching, embedding videos from third-party sites, and paying attention to other factors that affect bandwidth.
How Can You Check Bandwidth?
Whether your hosting provider offers unlimited bandwidth, you should always monitor your bandwidth usage to see if you can maximize your cost-efficacy and provide users with a favorable experience.
The most popular option for checking bandwidth is using cPanel, a Linux-based hosting option. Using cPanel, you can simply log in and visit the statistics section, which shows you your disk and bandwidth usage.
How Do I Know If I Have Enough Bandwidth?
When analyzing your bandwidth, you should first look at how much traffic your site experiences and how much data you can send and receive with each visitor. For small businesses, most people would be shocked to learn you require very little bandwidth to ensure your site’s efficacy.
Unless you run a site that requires thousands of visitors per day or one where each visitor requires a large amount of bandwidth, you likely won’t need to adjust your bandwidth requirements.
If your site also uses more bandwidth than expected, you might need to upgrade to a hosting package that can support more bandwidth. If this is the case, you will need to use a reputable web hosting provider to fulfill these needs.
Key Takeaways
Unlimited bandwidth is a term companies should beware of due to web hosting providers’ penchant for claiming bandwidth is unlimited but really means that bandwidth is unlimited if you want to purchase additional bandwidth.
Companies should examine whether their sites require unlimited bandwidth. If your site doesn’t experience spikes in traffic, you shouldn’t have to worry about bandwidth concerns.
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’ disclosure policy.
