Bandwidth limit in hosting plans?

[Cienja]

Hi all. I'm hoping someone can explain what the "bandwidth limit" is on hosting programs. For example, I have a plan through godaddy that gives me:

Disk Space: 100000.00 MB (100gb?)
Bandwidth: 1000000.00 MB (how many gb is this?)

I understand the disk space limit, but not the Bandwidth. What affects the Bandwidth? Visitors to the site? Downloads? Both? What about uploads?

Thanks, and sorry if this isn't the appropriate forum for this post!

🙂

 

[Markbnj]

Without getting into powers of 2, 1,000,000 megs is very roughly 1000 gigs. The term bandwidth is used somewhat loosely. You might see people referring to their bandwidth as "5 megs per second" which in that case is the amount of data the line can transfer per second. In hosting plans what they usually mean is the total amount of data you are allowed to move on to, or off of, the server over some time period (usually one month). If you go over that amount users who try to connect will get a "sorry page." So, for example, if you had a 1 gig movie file and 1000 people downloaded it (again very roughly) you would use up your bandwidth allocation for the month.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Markbnj said it exactly right.

Do keep in mind that many providers have limits on CPU usage and so they indirectly restrict the bandwidth to something smaller, maybe 5-10% of what is advertised. They also have clauses in the agreement regarding how the disk space is used and so assuming this is just one of their standard plans for a small price, you shouldn't expect to be able to really use 1000GB of bandwidth.

 

[Cienja]

Thanks for the information! It's very helpful!