What is Bandwidth?

In it's simplest meaning, Bandwidth can be described as the amount of traffic your hosting package entitles you too.

To break it down further, traffic could be described as the amount of data that can be consumed within your hosting - you could liken it in a way to the data allowance you have within your phone bill each month.

Our Bandwidth entitlements reset monthly - from the first, to last day of the month. So you will notice on the first day of a new month, the allowance will reset back down to zero.

In terms of what factors consume bandwidth, it can be described as anything relating to your site that involves the passing of data between a visitor and the server your hosting is running from. For example, every time a visitor navigates to your site and loads the homeppage, this will consume a small amount of Bandwidth, similiarly, if they click a link within your site to take them to another page on the domain, the next page will consume a small amount of bandwidth (because it has to load the contents of the page so it can be seen).

Two of the most common factors that people often miss when looking at their Bandwidth usage is that Email and FTP count towards your monthly allowance. For example, if you send an email with a 5MB attachment to 10 people, this would use up 50MB of Bandwidth to send. Similarly, when first constructing your site and uploading via FTP, if you were to upload 500MB of images to your hosting to use on your site, this would use up 500MB of your Bandwidth allowance for the month.