What is Bandwidth in Web Hosting?

Bandwidth is a measurement of how much data goes between

your website and anyone viewing your website. Today web hosts offer such a huge amount of bandwidth that it isn't really a factor for the typical website. Some hosting companies also call bandwidth data transfer.

For a more detailed illustration of how bandwidth works just imagine your website and how much room it takes up. If you have one picture on your front page that is 15 Kilobytes(kb) big and your text/html adds another 5 Kilobytes(kb) that would be a total of 20kb. So if Bob in Nebraska is viewing your front page your host sends your web page to his computer so he can view it. It sends 20kb to him and thus you use 20kb of bandwidth that your host gives you.

This is a very small amount of bandwidth and a host might offer 5GB of bandwidth to use a month which means Bob would have to view your site over 260,000 times in one month to max you out. Most big hosts offer 50GB of bandwidth or more a month so this really isn't an issue unless you are showing large video or photo files to thousands of people a day.

Explanation of Bandwidth Measurements:

1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1024 Megabytes (MB)
1 Megabyte (MB) = 1024 Kilobytes (KB)
1 Kilobyte (KB) = 1024 Bytes (So small no one uses them anymore!)