What exactly is "bandwidth"

[cashman9]

Ok ok, I know. Stupid question, right? But after reading a few of the posts on this board, it seems like "bandwidth" is something serious to take into consideration when choosing a web hosting company. What exactly is "bandwidth" as it pertains to web design? What types of web sites are affected by the bandwidth? I understand it has something to do with downloading, but if you're running an informational or personal homepage, does bandwidth matter? Thanks, please forgive my stupid question.

[The Red Guy]

Here's a similar thread: http://freewebspace.net/forums/showt...threadid=14716

[cashman9]

So what should I be looking for in terms of bandwidth per day? It seems like most hosts offer around 30 mb a day, it doesn't seem like a lot. And what happens once you reach your limit, does the page just stop loading after you hit the 30 mb (or whatever it is) mark?

[The Red Guy]

Bandwidth is depends on how much traffic of your site will generate. For example if you have 100 visitors per day, each visitor view 5 pages of your web site and each page is 10K, then your bandwidth is approximately 150MB per month.


(From DigitalHost.net)

The amount of bandwidth depends on how many hits your site gets.

[trenzterra]

Originally posted by cashman9
So what should I be looking for in terms of bandwidth per day? It seems like most hosts offer around 30 mb a day, it doesn't seem like a lot. And what happens once you reach your limit, does the page just stop loading after you hit the 30 mb (or whatever it is) mark?

it depends on the host on what they do when your bandwidth limit exceeds. You can try contacting the web host to see what will happen.

[Bruce]

Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer used per second.