How much bandwidth do I need?
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"Your ability to predict your bandwidth usage will improve concurrently with your ability make the money to pay for more." |
The bandwidth question is probably one of the most asked among newbie webmasters. Many the novice has made the mistake of miscalculating his/her bandwidth needs. Some get too much. Some get too little. Too many turn the subject of bandwidth into a bigger crisis than it really should be. The adult webmaster will face a few woes but the subject of bandwidth does NOT have to be one of them.
To make you feel better, let's start with this wonderful fact:
The great thing about working in the adult Internet is that a webmaster can expect to pay the lowest prices for the best services.
Mainstream vendors - such as web hosts - will rob a webmaster blind. In the adult Internet, the servers are inexpensive, the tech support top notch and the starter packages are a steal. Nowhere else will you find web hosting with such affordable quality. Adult pay hosts deal with the busiest destinations on the web. They're prepared for almost any kind of script, file format or database. They can handle huge networks as easily as one, small site. Adult hosts are prepared with the most secure, up-to-date protections for their clients. Even if you plan to create a non-adult site, you can't find better hosting deals than you can among the vendors that cater to porn websites.
Now that you understand the incredible value of adult pay hosting, let's move on to the issue of bandwidth calculation.
When you open a hosting account, you're going to be paying for basically three things:
Storage, Transfer and Bandwidth.
Storage is the amount of space the host server gives you to store all the images, video clips and HTML pages of your site. For instance, a hosting package might include 2 Gigabytes of storage. If you only have 1 Gigabyte worth of content, you will still have to pay for 2 Gigabytes of storage.
Transfer is what happens when a surfer opens your site and downloads your content to his/her browser. For example, if your main page, three galleries (including full size images) and warning page all add up to 1 Megabyte, and one surfer opens all of it, then that surfer will have transferred 1 Megabyte to his/her machine. 20 surfers = 20 Megabytes of transfer and so on.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass from the hosting server to the surfer, per second. If your hosting account comes with a large Bandwidth allocation, then your pages, images and videos will load quicker. Larger bandwidth allocations are very important for extremely busy pages and/or sites that serve up bandwidth-heavy content such as video. In other words, bandwidth is the amount of data that will flow through the pipe per second.
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What is confusing for the new adult webmaster is that the word BANDWIDTH is often used when referring to all three: storage, transfer and data bytes per second. The webmaster whose traffic exceeded his/her allowance of transfer will often claim "I blew my bandwidth". When in reality, he/she actually exceeded his/her transfer limit.
Of course, none of this really answers that all-important "how much" question of bandwidth.
If you're a new adult webmaster, with no paid hosting experience, then it's somewhat impossible to tell you how much you will need because the determining factors are unknown. To give you a bandwidth total, one must know the answers to questions like:
How many visitors will open your site per month? How many of them will download all your content vs. those that download just a few images? How many users will be visiting your site simultaneously? One can only determine these factors by putting a site online and studying average bandwidth usage over a reasonable period of time.
Our best advice is to stop suffering the Bandwidth Woes before they actually happen. Chances are, if you're new, you're not going to be receiving monster traffic to begin with anyway. Your ability to predict your bandwidth usage will improve concurrently with your ability make the money to pay for more.
Start out with a small, virtual hosting package and work your way up as need be. Research your hosting company. Find out how much they will charge you for overages. Make sure that you can upgrade your account easily. Email or call your host and ask them exactly how they handle your account when you exceed your bandwidth limit. You want a host that will work with you.
When it comes to bandwidth, you want to be prepared. You don't want to underestimate or overestimate your requirements. You want to find a happy medium between too little and too much. Find the host that will give you the best deal and the most support. Bandwidth is vital to an adult webmaster but it should never be a cause for woe.