Difference between Bandwidth and Data Transfer
It is quite often to see Bandwidth and Data Transfer been used synonymously on the internet, especially on web hosting plans.
However, there is quite a difference between these two terms technically. Bandwidth is a measurement of the data transfer rate over a medium (network).
Your site will load faster if you have more bandwidth. On the other hand, Data Transfer is the traffic generated (or amount of data transferred) from a site.
The amount of data transferred will depend on the number of visitors to the site and the file sizes of web pages (including multimedia files).
In web hosting, the least data transfer you have, the more often you'll find your site unavailable because you're reached the maximum allowed until a new month rolls by or you upgrade your account.
Calculate Your Monthly Data Transfer
If you have a popular site, please get ready to calculate the required monthly data transfer.
Monthly Data Transfer = (Visitors per Day x Average Page Size x Page Views x 30 days) + (Average Downloads x File Size x 30 days)
Data transfer is measured in bytes, kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB). If a website delivers 100,000 pages each month with average page file size of 20 KB, the data transfer per month will be 2GB.
Hence, 20GB Data Transfer will be sufficient for 1,000,000 page views a month and translates to about 20,000 unique visitors per day.
In fact, almost 80% of websites on the internet uses less than 5GB of data transfer per month. Data Transfer limit given by Exabytes.com is far higher than 5GB, and hence our customers normally need not to worry about it in most situation.
How to Reduce Data Transfers?
You can reduce the total amount of data transfer by building an optimised website using following methods:
1. Optimize your image files before added into your web pages, and try to use web-friendly format such as .jpg and .gif instead of using large file such as .bmp. Besides, remove unused tags, spacing and comments in your web pages before uploading to web server.
2. Reduce the usage of fancy flash presentations or streaming audio.
3. Try to use CSS and JavaScript link externally instead of embedding in every page.
JavaScript Call Sample:
<SCRIPT language="JavaScript" src="scripts/sample.js" type=text/javascript></SCRIPT>
CSS Sample:
<LINK href="css/sample.css" rel=stylesheet title="Exabytes.com" type=text/css>
