Website bandwidth is the amount of data a website can transfer to visitors within a set time. All website that’s available on the web is accessible because of web hosting. When the web servers that host a website serve up its content to visitors, they require bandwidth.
The more visitors come to a website at a time is the more bandwidth the site has to use just to load simple web pages. Websites that have dynamic content and media like video and audio requires more bandwidth.
Website bandwidth affects directly how well your website performs. If a visitor tries to watch a video on the website the amount of bandwidth it requires is minimal compared to 500,000 visitors. A lot of bandwidth is required in order to provide a decent playback quality for all of them. If the site’s web hosting plan doesn’t offer enough bandwidth, those visitors will face slow loading times, buffering, or videos that fail to load entirely.
How much bandwidth your website has to work with is determined by your web hosting plan. The web servers that web hosting providers use are typically powerful enough to promise a lot of bandwidth.
But for many types of web hosting plans, your website will be sharing a server with a bunch of others. When all that bandwidth is divided between dozens or hundreds of websites, each website faces limits on how much they can use without performance suffering.
The amount of bandwidth your website needs to perform well for visitors depends on few factors:
The number of visitors that come to your website
How big your website is (in terms of number of pages)
How much rich content your website hosts.
If your website has great images, it will require more bandwidth to perform well than one that’s majorly text. If it has a lot of audio, video, or downloadable content, your needs will be much higher.
For small businesses that have simple websites with just a few pages and limited content, your bandwidth needs will be basic while bigger businesses, organizations, and media sites will often have needs beyond the amount of bandwidth available on a shared plan.
The next step up is a Virtual private server (VPS) plan
This is still on a shared server,it’s shared between fewer websites and your section is blocked off from the others so you really don’t have to worry about their bandwidth use affecting your performance.
VPS plans cost more but you can count on faster loading times and better website performance once your website outgrows a shared hosting plan.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting web plans make it easy for you to scale up and down as needed, and only pay for what you use.In case you want to avoid paying for VPS-level bandwidth all year long when you only need it for part of the year, a cloud plan ensures you can ramp up your bandwidth access during your busy months, then shift things back down the rest of the time.