What is Web Hosting Bandwidth?
What is bandwidth and what does it have to do with web hosting in South Africa?
Pretty much everything… According to wikipedia
In website hosting, bandwidth is the amount of information downloadable from the webserver over a prescribed period of time. In essence, it is the rate [data/time], but the time in this case is not seconds but rather a month or a week. Common connection rate terms such as 56K, broadband, ADSL, wireless, etc. are also bandwidth, but are measured per second. Web hosting companies often quote a monthly bandwidth limit for a website, for example 100 GB/month. If visitors to the website download a total greater than 100 GB in one month, the bandwidth limit will have been exceeded.
With the cost of hosting in South Africa, an entry level website will only receive mayhaps 1% of 100 GB, max. Many ZA webhosting companies adwordvertise huge amounts of web space and no bandwidth limits, charge next-to-nothing hosting fees and they’ll even throw in a FREE* domain name. Yes thank you it costs next to nothing but have you ever asked yourself these questions:
- What will your clients experience of your site, hosted overseas, be like when using a dial-up connection?
- All your clients use ADSL? When Telkom/saix/whoever have international bandwidth problems will you be able to access that all important email on your low-cost internationally hosted web server?
- Where will your site appear in Local Search Results if you are hosted over there and have an non-South African domain name?
Your thoughts or questions? Still waiting for Telkom to install our ADSL so we’ve got lots of time to answer your questions.