Posted on January 9th, 2008
What is bandwidth?
Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your website and the rest of the Internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is partially determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the Internet.
Think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly, even if there is only one lane. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour—even on a six lane road—you'll end up travelling very slowly since all of the lanes are being used at once.
You might also look at bandwidth as being similar to the number of minutes you have per month on your cell phone plan. The more information (length of conversation) you try to pass through your phone, the more minutes you will need to use to do so. The more often your pages are visited, or the bigger the files are that make up your pages, the more bandwidth is used for your site's traffic.
To Learn More...
- Wiki Encyclopedia Definition
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth - Bandwidth and 'Unlimited' Bandwidth
www.buffyguide.com/webmasters/whatisbw.shtml - Bandwidth Speed Test
www.bandwidth.com/tools/speedTest
