Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Bandwidth Explained

This is a well-written explanation of the bandwidth, very useful information.

Banda Explained

Most hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So what is the bandwidth with respect to web hosting? In short, the 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 determined by their network connections, both internally and to its data center and external to the public Internet.

Networking

Internet, the most simplest terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. These include links to the Internet can be large or small, depending on the wiring and equipment used in a specific place on the Internet. And 'the size of each network connection that determines the amount of available bandwidth. For example, if you use DSL to connect to the Internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. So the bandwidth is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form words, text and other information transferred between computers and the Internet.

If you have an ADSL Internet connection, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your ISP. But your ISP may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these aggregates to connect to your ISP who then their own dedicated connection to the Internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single connection. They must have sufficient bandwidth to meet your computing needs, and all their other clients. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to your ISP, your ISP has a 255Mb connection to the Internet so it can meet your needs and up to 166 other users (255/1.54).

Traffic

A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to 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. If you get stuck in the middle of rush hour, you can travel very slowly since all channels are used.

Traffic is simply the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. It is easier to understand traffic using examples. One gigabyte is 2 to 30 power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes. To put this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine a building 100 folders, each of these cabinets are 1000 records. Each file contains 100 articles. Each paper contains 100 characters - A GB is all the characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a 800MB 1000MB film full of (1000MB = 1GB).

If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a website to your computer, you must create 4MB of traffic between the site and you download from your computer. According to the network connection between the site and the Internet, the transfer can occur very quickly, or it may take time if other people are downloading at the same time. For example, if the site you download from has a 10 MB Internet connection and you're the only person to access this web site to download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on this site. But if three people request the same member in the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic was created. Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth, someone will have to wait.

Banda Hosting

In the above example, we discussed traffic in terms of downloading an MP3 file. However, each time you visit a website, you are creating traffic, because, to view this page in your computer, the first Web page downloaded to your computer (between the website and you), which below through your browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.). The page itself is simply a file that creates traffic just like the MP3 file in the example above (however, a Web page usually much more smaller than a music file).

A Web page can be very small or large, depending on the amount of text and the number and quality of the images included in the website. For example, the homepage of CNN.com is 200 KB (200 Kilobytes = 200000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is usually ideal for a website. In comparison, the Yahoo home page is about 70KB.

How much bandwidth is enough?

It depends (do not hate you the answer). But in reality, it does. Since bandwidth is a major factor in the price hosting plan, you should take the time to determine what is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, then you must estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis

If you do not intend to offer the ability to download files from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly simple:

Visitors average daily page views x average page size x 31 x Fudge Factor average x

If you are going to allow people to upload files to the site of the bandwidth calculation should be:

[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average page size) +

(Average Daily Downloads File average filesize x)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Each element of the formula:

Average Daily Visitors - The number of people will visit your site on average every day. Depending on how you promote your site, this number could be 1 to 1,000,000.

Average Page Views - Average number of web pages you expect a person to see. If you have 50 web pages of the website, the average person can see only 5 of those pages each time they visit.

Average page size - The average size of your web pages, in kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate directly.

Average file downloads Daily - The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is the number of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average each day.

Average file size - The average file size of files downloaded from the site. Similar to your site, if you already know which files to download, can be calculated directly.

Fudge Factor - is greater than 1 Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that the estimate is off by 50%. If, however, very uncertain, you can use 2 or 3, so that the bandwidth requirements more than satisfied.

Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

Devices on the network hosting company is going through files of every person to be downloaded and transferred to a small section at a time, so that each person's file transfer can take place, but the transfer of all, download the file will be slow. If 100 people all came to the site and download the MP3 at the same time, the transfers would be extremely slow. If the host wanted to decrease the time it takes to download files at the same time, can increase the bandwidth of their Internet access (surcharge due to upgrading equipment).

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