If you run a website, it’s highly likely that you will have come across the terms bandwidth and data transfer at some point. They may be mentioned in your web hosting plan’s terms and conditions, and you might even have limits on their use. Unfortunately, it can be easy to get confused between bandwidth and data transfer. They are similar concepts and they are often used as synonyms of each other, even in the web hosting industry. However, there are clear differences between them that could affect your website’s performance, so here we’ll explain what those differences are.
How are bandwidth and data transfer different?
The confusion comes because both these terms refer to data being sent to and from your server. However, bandwidth is the amount of data that is sent and received at any one time and data transfer is the total amount of data sent or received over a period of time. In web hosting, data transfer usually refers to the amount of data sent and received during each billing cycle.
How bandwidth and transfer limits affect your website
Depending on your hosting provider or your particular hosting plan, you may find that you have got bandwidth and/or data transfer limits. Each of these can affect your website’s performance in different ways.
As bandwidth affects how much data can be sent or received at the same time, this can affect your website if you have a lot of customers all trying to visit your website at once. Each time someone visits a page on your website or interacts with it, your server will send and receive data. If the number of visitors increases, you may reach the bandwidth limit set by your hosting provider. Once this happens, you’ll get the website equivalent of a traffic jam. Users will be trying to reach your site, but because the amount of data that can be sent and received is maxed to its limit, your website will load and respond very slowly. If you have very large numbers of visitors at the same time, it could potentially crash, just like if you had a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattack. The biggest problem with bandwidth issues, however, is that they occur when your website is at its busiest. They usually happen at peak times of the year, during key shopping seasons or sales – just when you don’t need them to happen.
With data transfer limits, the outcome can be significantly more of an issue. If you use up your data transfer quota halfway through your billing cycle, your website will simply go offline until your next billing cycle commences. It’s exactly the same principle as using up your phone’s data limit. With a phone, however, you can always buy more data to tide you over. With hosting, you’ll usually need to upgrade to a hosting plan that allows you to transfer more data. It will, of course, cost more, though if your business relies on your website, you’ll need to upgrade to keep your website available online.
Non-metered vs unlimited bandwidth
The obvious choice to overcome a hosting provider’s limits on bandwidth and data transfer is to choose a web host that doesn’t set limits – like eukhost. However, there is a key difference between non-metered and unlimited bandwidth that you should also be aware of. Unmetered bandwidth simply means that your host won’t set limits on how much data you use at any one time (provided you follow their fair use policy).
For most websites, this is absolutely fine and will prevent the issues mentioned above. However, it does not mean you will get unlimited bandwidth. The reason for this is the physical limitations of the server itself. Even a high-powered dedicated server with huge amounts of RAM and the latest microprocessors will have a natural limit on how much data it can send and receive at the same time. If you’re a company that has millions of users visiting every day, the only guaranteed solution to ensure you don’t run out of the server resources to handle all your visitors is to host your website in the cloud. This is because, in the cloud, you can scale up resources (storage, RAM and CPU) at the click of a button, giving you enough additional bandwidth to keep your site performing at its best for everyone who visits.
Avoiding bandwidth and data transfer issues
If you run a small website with low numbers of visitors, the way to avoid issues is to choose a web host that offers unmetered bandwidth and data transfer, that way, even a shared hosting plan should ensure your website can load quickly and stay online. If you have a growing website and increasing traffic, then you may need to upgrade to a hosting solution that offers more RAM and CPU to cater for your needs, such as moving from shared hosting to VPS or from VPS to a dedicated server. If you have a busy website that will occasionally have extremely high traffic, then opt for cloud hosting which offers temporary scaling to cater for peak times.
Conclusion
From reading this post, you should now be aware of the difference between bandwidth and data transfers. You should also know how having limits on these can affect your website’s performance and what you can do to overcome this.
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2 Comments
Yep, data transfer and bandwidth are two different things data transfer means the amount of digital data transfered from one location to the another whereas bandwidth means the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time.
Data transfer and Bandwidth are two different things although they are very closely related but a lot of people tend to consider them the same. Data transfer is all of the information transferred from your web site to your visitor’s computer; Bandwidth on the other hand is the capacity for this transfer.