Bandwidth and Data Transfer is often confused and sometimes called the same thing with a number of web hosting companies, where in fact they are two different things.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can potentially be transferred from one point to another, whereas Data Transfer is the amount of data actually being transferred at any one time.
Because Bandwidth and Data Transfer are often confused, you will sometimes find Bandwidth measured on a data-amount per month basis, such as 10Gb / Month. This means the web hosting company is limiting your account to transferring 10Gb’s of data each month.
There are a multitude of things on a website that can take up Bandwidth or Data Transfer, but the first thing that can be reduced is the amount of images. If there is one large image on your websites homepage which is 500KB and you get 300 different people look at your site in one month, then you will use 1.5GB’s of Data Transfer that month – and this does not include the HTML file which serves the image, along with any other images on the site, perhaps a CSS file, and perhaps other pages or images!
It is important to work out the size of your site and then amount of people you are hoping to get visit it on a per-month basis before deciding on the package you will go for with your new web hosting company.
It is always desired to try and reduce the amount of Bandwidth or Data Transfer a website uses which is sometimes relatively easy to do. It usually involves reducing the amount of images the website uses, or at the very least, optimizing the images to reduce their filesize. Styles embedded directly into the pages on your site can be placed into an external CSS stylesheet to reduce each pages’ filesize even further, and by doing this will also allow easier and quicker updating of styles in the future, as well as quicker page loading times for your visitors.
