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Calculating Bandwidth by
Sexco

Have you ever wondered what all this Bandwidth talk is about with Internet
and Web Hosting Companies? Often webmasters and people in general are not
familiar with these terms, otherwise known as Data Transfer, Gigabyte transfers,
metered and Un-metered services.

When you want your website to be visible on the Internet for web surfers to
view by entering your URL. You will need to have a web hosting account, these
types of accounts are usually virtual hosting, also known as shared hosting and
servers. Virtual/Shared is when you have a small website and you want to share
the server with other websites that share the resources of the machine for a
fraction of the monthly cost. A Server is where you have control of the whole
machine and do not share it with other websites; you can add several of your own
websites to a server. Web Hosting accounts are based on disk space size,
bandwidth usage and add-on features.

Bandwidth is a term used to describe the amount of data that your website
transmits over the course of a month. Every time a client accesses your web
page, they download your images and your HTML files, thus increasing your
bandwidth. If you were to put a large movie, say a size of 100 MB into your
hosting account, after just 10 downloads you will have achieved 1 GB of
bandwidth (10x100MB = 1GB). This means that every time someone access's your
website, it is going to calculate the total of all data size information that is
going to be transmitted to their computer is going to be called bandwidth.
Bandwidth includes the total amount of data that you are transferring in/out of
the server, including ftp transfers, and email.

It is very common to find that bandwidth is going to be calculated by the
Gigabyte, also known as GB. A starter size website with a few images and pages
can generate up to 2GB in a month, where as a bigger, more established site with
traffic could use up to 45GB on a virtual/shared hosting account. For those who
anticipate or handle large volumes of bandwidth, then a server will accommodate
you better with average capabilities of handling up to 350GB of bandwidth before
any hardware upgrades would be needed to reach a higher bandwidth level.

If you use more then 327GB in a month, then it will be common to refer to
your usage as 1Meg sustained. This means you are transferring data at an average
speed of 1Megabyte per second sustained throughout the month. At this point it
would be common to start referring to how many Megs of traffic do you handle in
a month. This is where it is common to be billed using the 95th percentile
calculation.

95th Percentile billing calculates the total in and out traffic from your
server. On a high speed Internet connection such as a 10/100Meg connection, you
will be able to peak as high as you need. This is why some server connections
are faster then others, as they have access to burst on a large-scale network if
their website traffic increases. Over the period of a month, the software
calculates samples of the highest peaks and sustained traffic and eliminates the
top 5% peaks. Then you are billed for the other 95% usage.

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