Complete Guide To Hosting - Part 2

5. Bandwidth and the Quality of Hosting

When you look for a suitable host, be sure to check out the amount of bandwidth that will be available to your site. Even a site that doesn't require a great deal of data transfer per month could run slowly if you're hosted on a shared server; particularly if you are on the same server as a more popular or bandwidth-intensive site.

The more sites hosted on a server, the more likely they are to compete with each other for available resources, including bandwidth. This is why you may notice a reduction in server response times during busy periods, or during a sudden peak in traffic at a busier site on a server that you share.

Redundancy Matters

How much bandwidth is left unused to allow for sudden peaks in traffic at any time is known as redundant bandwidth. The more redundant bandwidth a particular server has, the more likely it is to cope well with sudden peaks in traffic, which can make all the difference between a pitiful and a successful advertising campaign.

If your site is consistently slow and busy (particularly at set times during the day), then it could certainly benefit from having more bandwidth. The chances are that your host doesn't provide enough redundant bandwidth to deal with normal demand -- they may need to upgrade their bandwidth capacity, or simply review their bandwidth management strategy.

Ideally, any host you consider should have connections to the backbone, with at least two service providers, and at least 25% redundancy in all its connections. The higher the number of connections, service providers, and percentage of redundancy, the better the system will cope when things get busy.

Bursting the Bandwidth Barrier

By purchasing a plan that allows for burstable bandwidth, you'll help prevent your site slowing down during peak traffic periods. Burstable bandwidth means that you can use more bandwidth than your hosting plan would normally allow should you need to, which is extremely handy should the flow of traffic coming and going from your server suddenly peak. Note that the amount of additional bandwidth available will depend on the level of the redundant bandwidth in the backbone connections your site has access to.

Hosts that offer burstable bandwidth with your package will let you make use of some (or all) of the redundant bandwidth to help your site cope with the traffic. This should only be used as a short term solution -- if you consistently utilize more bandwidth than your hosting package allows, you really ought to upgrade.

Serving Large Files and Multimedia

If you hadn't guessed it already, bandwidth availability can have a significant impact on both the quantity and quality of site downloads, whether they're large archives or multimedia presentations. As access to the server becomes more difficult to obtain, the number of packets lost increases. For small files, such as Web pages and images, this isn't such a problem; packet loss is (statistically) less likely to occur on small files. On the other hand, larger files are more likely to lose data during transfer, as there are more opportunities for packets to become lost, and this, in turn, can adversely affect the quality of the download. Files can become corrupted, and streaming media grows more jittery as more data is lost.

If you intend to host downloads or multimedia files on your site, it's worth shopping around for a host that offers plenty of bandwidth, data transfer, and a good level of redundancy in its connections to the backbone. Having a server that can support resume if it serves large files is useful, as it saves unnecessary data transfer.

Your bandwidth and data transfer costs will make up the bulk of your hosting bill. While burstable bandwidth may be a luxury you could afford to do without, it's always a good idea to get as much bandwidth and redundancy as your budget will allow.

Bandwidth and Data Transfer Explained - the name of this page says it all!