I know that bandwidth is how much file transferring you get when a person visits your site and behind the scenes downloads your files to view that site, but I don't know, and would like to know how many visitors can visit your site with 'X' amount of bandwidth..

Questions:
--How many visitors can visit a site with 1GB Bandwidth?
--What happens if you use all your bandwidth?
--When hosting sites say "unlimited" bandwidth do they really mean it or will be be a time where you actually do run out of it?

Thanks.

How many visitors can visit a site with 1GB Bandwidth [per month]?
It depends,

"To determine how much bandwidth you need, estimate the file size of each web page, and then multiply it by the number of pages on your web site. Multiply this figure by the number of the number of page views you expect per month from your site."

So, Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31

If you're just starting out, you will not have much traffic anyway, so 1Gb bandwidth should be sufficient. If you have music/video/downloads, then 1Gb might not be enough. Most hosts nowadays offer more than 1Gb bandwidth.


What happens if you use all your bandwidth?
Some hosts close your account until the bandwidth limit is refreshed (month is over), other hosts may charge for extra bandwidth usage. (check the TOS)


When hosting sites say "unlimited" bandwidth do they really mean it or will be be a time where you actually do run out of it?
There is no such thing as 'unlimited bandwidth'. Most websites only use a small amount of bandwidth and disk space, and you will be probably be suspended because of high cpu/ram usage before you find out how much you can really use. (check the TOS for cpu/ram usage)



TOS - Terms of Service

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Awesome! Thanks for that information, very useful!

And the hosting company that Ive seen that has "unlimited" bandwidth and disk space is hostmonster.com, so I don't know if its truly unlimited or just a lot.

Again, Thank you!

Okay. Another question about bandwidth.

So everytime a visitor comes, how every many pages they view takes bandwidth.

Does it take up bandwidth if the same person visits your website over a period of a week a couple times? And they go to the same pages..

It will do yes.

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If they go to the same web pages over and over, the browser might have cached them.

I think bandwidth is one of the last things you have to worry about, as most hosts provide more than enough. Trying to get enough visitors to fill up that bandwidth, now there's a real task.

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I agree. With hosts providing gigabytes of bandwidth, you probably won't use it up unless you have a lot of visitors.

If you are close to your bandwidth limit, you can try caching as mentioned above and gzipping your text files. Both can be done within your.htaccess file. It requires technical knowledge before editing, but learning it can reduce your bandwidth and increase your sites perceived speed.

Some other thoughts, ensure no one links to your files, such as images and keep your images as small as possible.

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