YNOT – In previous articles we looked at how to assess a hosting service based on the characteristics of the website we want to create, and we have paid particular attention to the choice of the physical space available to both the files and the database.

Today we deal with bandwidth requirements, which no doubt are of paramount importance for the success of a site.

Bandwidth is the maximum transmission rate of any communication channel — that is, the maximum amount of information a channel can transmit per unit of time. As you can well understand, the lower the bandwidth requirement, the better the accessibility of a web portal and its contents.

Pages that load slowly annoy most end-users and may cause them to go elsewhere. Leaving out the connection problems on the visitor’s end, the main causes of slowdowns are to be found in the bandwidth served by the web space provider. Problems may be generated by:

• Size of the web pages within a site: A web page can take a few KB to several MB of space depending on its content. Text (no doubt the lightest-weight content) requires much less bandwidth to serve than multimedia (video and photos increase the “weight” of a page). When a user loads a page containig a large amount of data, restricted bandwidth on the server and the network can slow down the speed at which the page appears in a browser. A slow website can damage a business’ reputation.

• Shared bandwidth: To share the same bandwidth between multiple websites can be a very harmful practice. In most cases, there is no way to tell how much bandwidth each site requires or how many sites are crammed onto one band. To avoid seeing your best efforts to optimize pages and sites canceled by another site’s wastefulness, it is a good idea to use hosting services that offer unlimited bandwidth, or at least dedicate a specific amount of bandwidth to each of the sites they serve.

• Online audience: Even the smallest available bandwidth may be enough for a single user but could start to create problems when a large number of users attempt to access a single page at once, even if your page’s weight is not particularly dense. It’s good to choose a hosting service that will provide the bandwidth appropriate for the presumed audience of the website so as to avoid problems of sustainability and to avoid sudden upgrade fees if you exceed the allotted bandwidth.

It is clear that in order to use a hosting service that will suit as your website grows and evolves, careful evaluation of the host’s offerings is required. In the beginning, you may want to test your site on a free hosting service in order to determine how much bandwidth your pages and traffic may require. Then, move the site to a host that can meet the site’s needs without constant reevaluation of the services provided.

This article was written for YNOT by Eng. Antonio Lodesani. For more information, visit ingoccupati.blogspot.com (in Italian).