Increased cost of bandwidth

The dream of every person hosting a website is to have as much traffic as possible to visit his or her site. In the early days of the Internet eyeball count used to determine the success of the site, so much so that the high density of traffic used to convert into ad revenues for the site; and that was a good enough revenue model that was sufficient to justify throwing away services free of charge. The relevance of site traffic is as strong today as it was earlier although for slightly different reasons. So one should be happy when the traffic is high and happier when it is higher, right? Unfortunately, the answer is not always a simple yes. The reason lies in something known as bandwidth. Abcdesigning through their hosting company hostinfo.co.uk provides a range of hosting plans with varied allowed bandwidth.

What exactly is bandwidth?

Strictly speaking, bandwidth stands for what it actually says – the density of traffic that the connection can handle in unit time expressed in bytes, kilobytes or megabytes per second (bps, kbps, or mbps). Real bandwidth is something like the width of your highway. On a narrow highway you cannot have too much traffic at the same time. If you do, there’s a traffic jam resulting in slow movement of traffic. Unfortunately most web hosting companies don’t refer to bandwidth in this strictly correct technical sense, but use the term to denote the amount of traffic that has actually passed to and from your site in a particular period. For reasons that have their base in the real technical meaning of bandwidth as explained above, web hosting companies cannot afford to let you have unlimited amount of file and data transfer to and from your, because the web hosting provider has a limited bandwidth. If everybody starts using this bandwidth to send and receive a lot of information, there’s going to be a jam and traffic is going to become slow. So this needs to be discouraged beyond a certain point. However, if people don’t mind paying for the additional usage, and the problem is a permanent one, the company may have to increase its bandwidth for which it has to invest money. So there’s a cost attached to such increase. Either way, your web hosting provider will have to charge you for the bandwidth that you use beyond a certain point, and that’s why free unlimited bandwidth is a myth.

How is all this relevant to you as the end user? When you increase traffic to your site there is a cost that you will necessarily have to bear because of the increased cost that it means to the web hosting company. This means that increasing traffic to your site means increased cost for you. There’s only one way to resolve this dilemma – increased traffic to your site should bring in increased revenue to you. If it doesn’t, then you are going to lose money not make it. This makes it important for you to take care of two things – know the cost of bandwidth that you will be incurring at various levels of activity in advance, and ensure that this cost translates into revenue by ensuring that you get only relevant traffic to your site.

Know your bandwidth cost

It’s important for you to know your bandwidth cost in advance for the reasons that we saw just now. You may be wondering what is complicated about knowing your bandwidth cost, since the web hosting company will make it clear to you at the time you sign up. Unfortunately, it is not so straightforward. If it were, this article would be unnecessary. First of all, in the absence of all this knowledge, the average person planning to have his or her website, might not even know that such a cost exists until the first bill comes. Companies don’t always make it very clear, and the information that they give is often hidden in small print or couched in technical language that most people may not understand.

Assuming that you do appreciate the need to know exactly what the company is going to charge for your bandwidth usage, you can still be conned by misleading statements and offers. For example, many companies offer “unlimited” bandwidth. As we saw just now, it is impossible for any company to offer this. What happens is that the offer is qualified or limited in some way that is not obvious. It’s like Henry Ford’s famous statement that the customer can have any color of car he wants as long as it’s black. Similarly, you can have unlimited bandwidth as long as you stay within limits!