Hosting - What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred from your website in a fixed amount of time (usually one month). It is expressed in units like MB or GB.

Before you signup with a web host, make sure they provide enough bandwidth for your website. It is far better to have more than less - if you exceed your bandwidth quota, they'll either charge you for excess bandwidth usage or worse - suspend your website!

At a minimum, start with 1000MB of bandwidth, or 1GB bandwidth if you operate a page only site. That is, your website consists mainly of webpages and a few graphics. However, if you allow your website visitors to download anything from your site, be it software or other large files (like PDF documents and ebooks), then get a web hosting account with atleast 5GB of bandwidth.

Lastly, don't ever believe hosting companies that promise unlimited bandwidth - this is a myth. Read the fine print in the terms and conditions page, because you'll find what the actual bandwidth limit is there.