Web Hosting terms-Transfer versus Bandwidth

[Dave White]

Are bandwidth and data transfer inter related or two different things when it comes to hosting?When looking for a web hosting company how to distinguish between the two?

[Ryan]

Bandwidth and Data Transfer are different although very closely related. Bandwidth refers to the total amount of data that can theoretically be transferred at any one time. while Data transfer is all of the information transferred from your web website hosting to your visitor’s computer.

[harry]

Data transfer can be considered as consumption of allocated bandwidth.

If you have limited bandwidth and have vast traffic then your website hosting may load very slow resulting in diversion of your visitors. In such case you can only opt for getting more bandwidth which may be expensive, so better way you should reduce your data transfer amount by building simpler more efficient website hostings with well optimize graphics this will help in saving bandwidth.

So If you have a huge website hosting with lots of graphics then you should have more bandwidth for faster data transfer.

[daledavies]

Hold on, dont those two answers conflict each other slightly?

Sorry, your probs going to hate me now but this is what I always thought...

From a communications point of view, Bandwidth (as you both stated) is the maximum amount of data that can be sent down a channel. It is generally described as the amount of data that can be sent per second (eg. kbps - kilo bits per second). However to confused things, this could also be called the "data transfer rate".

Dave, for "Data Transfer" are you talking about the maximum amount of data that can be transferred per month? Or the amount of data transferred in total?

I would suspect that if you were given both figures by a web host then Data Transfer would be described per month or "in total" and Bandwidth would be described per second.

As in, "you can transfer a maximum of 500k per second and you are allowed to transfer a maximum of 2 gig per month", or "you have transferred a total of 1gig so far and on average it was at 500k per second".

What figures have you been given for them both?

[rich]

Bandwidth is a measure of frequency range and is typically measured in hertz. Bandwidth is a central concept in many fields, including information theory, radio communications, signal processing, and spectroscopy. Bandwidth is related to channel capacity for information transmission and often the two can be confused. In particular, in common usage "bandwidth" also refers to data (information) transmission rates when communicating over certain media or devices.

In website hosting, bandwidth is the amount of information downloadable from the webserver over a prescribed period of time. In essence, it is the rate [data/time], but the time in this case is not seconds but rather a month or a week. Common connection rate terms such as 56K, broadband, etc. are also bandwidth, but are measured per second. Web hosting companies often quote a monthly bandwidth limit for a website hosting, for example 100 GB/month. If visitors to the website hosting download a total greater than 100 GB in one month, the bandwidth limit will have been exceeded.

Hope this will help too.

[Jack]

Bandwidth and data transfer are the most commonly used terms on internet specially seen on webhosting plans of different hosting companies. But technically there is lot of difference between them.

Bandwidth can be defined as quantity of data that can be transferred in per unit time.It is generally expressed in bits /sec (bps) or bytes/sec.

Data transfer is amount of traffic generated from a website hosting. It is expressed in bytes, kilo bytes (KB), mega bytes (MB) or giga bytes (GB).

[Dave White]

Thanks Guys, now it will be easy to distinguish between Data transfer and Bandwidth.