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Bandwidth, and Backups

What's The Deal With "Bandwidth"?

Bandwidth is vital for any consideration of choosing web hosting.  And an understanding of how it works is important.

There's basically two things to take into consideration:

How much bandwidth usage you're allowed.

And whether your bandwidth is "capped".

Okay - so first, what's bandwidth usage?

Well, we've already briefly touched on different measurements of data:

1 kilobyte = 1,024 bytes

1 megabyte = 1,024 kilobytes

1 gigabyte = 1,024 megabytes

And to put this into perspective - you can consider that a 56k dial up modem can download data at around 6 kilobytes a second.

Now let's go back to my dedicated server at Pair for this example:

I'm allowed 60 GB of traffic a month.

That means included with my monthly payment is an allowance of up to 62,914,560 kilobytes of data transferred.

As I write this, I'm averaging around 30 GB a month.  This is a lot compared to many web sites, and the reason for this is because I offer a lot of audio and video downloads, and those files can be large.

Now, what happens if I go over 60 GB in traffic a month?

Well, then I have to start paying overage.  Most web hosting companies have overage charges for when you go over your monthly allocated bandwidth usage.

If you find yourself often going over your allotted bandwidth amount, it's often worth upgrading your hosting account since paying overage is often quite expensive.

I've seen web hosting companies charge bandwidth overage at $5 or even $10 a GB.  For a dedicated server, Pair charge $2.95 for every GB you use over your allotted amount.

This can really add up.

So for example, if I find myself consistently going over 60 GB in traffic a month, I'll most likely quickly upgrade from QS-0 to QS-1 since that would be much more cost effective.  I'll then be allocated up to 200 GB of traffic a month before I have to pay any overage fees.

Now most shared hosting packages usually offer around either 5 GB or 10 GB of traffic a month.

Most small sites are lucky if they touch 1 GB of traffic a month, since web pages by themselves don't consist of much data.  Therefore high bandwidth usage isn't an issue for most sites.

And here is where you'll see the start of something called overselling.

Let's say that someone takes out a dedicated server at Pair for $250 a month and this gives them 200 GB of traffic a month.

If they then resell use of this server to customers, they know that most customers won't use more than around 1 GB of bandwidth a month.

So what they'll do to look competitive is offer "10 GB of traffic a month" for each of the hosting accounts.  They then sell 50 or perhaps even more accounts on that server.

A quick calculation will reveal that makes a total of 500 GB of traffic sold for that 200 GB server.  This is obviously overselling.  BUT - the reseller is making the assumption that most people will never get anywhere near to 10 GB so this won't be an issue.

Bear this important fact in mind when purchasing hosting.

You may sometimes see advertised "Unlimited bandwidth".  Well, this just isn't physically or financially possible so if you see a company that offers that, run.  (I've heard many stories of people signing up for such services, and when they start using a decent amount of bandwidth, their hosting account suddenly gets cancelled.)

No self-respecting hosting company would offer "unlimited bandwidth", especially if they plan to stay in business for any period of time, so don't take such offers seriously.

Now, what about capped bandwidth?

Well, if we take the example of a web hosting account with 30 GB of bandwidth allocated to it.

Instead of charging you when you go over 30 GB, a hosting company may cap how quickly data may pass through.

Let's do the maths:

30 GB a month = 31,457,280 KB a month

31,457,280 divided by 30 days (for a month) = 1,048,576 KB of bandwidth each day

1,048,576 KB allocated a day = 43,690.67 KB allocated for each hour

43,690.67 KB allocated an hour = 728.18 KB allocated for each minute

728.18 KB allocated a minute = 12.14 KB allocated a second

Therefore 30 GB a month of capped monthly traffic is the same as having a permanent pipe to your server that can handle up to 12.14 KB of traffic every second.

The problem with this is that if you get lots of people on your site at the same time, they're all sharing a limited amount of bandwidth, which can make downloading slow for all of them.

So for this reason, this can cause usage issues for surfers when they visit your sites.

Therefore uncapped (overage charged) bandwidth is recommended much more than capped bandwidth.

Now, let's talk "backups"...

How Important Are Backups?

In an ideal world, you want 0.00% of downtime for your web site.

Why?  Because if you're an online business, your web site is your shop front.  Since your web site runs automatically round the clock, you don't ever want your shop to be shut to potential customers.

Therefore you want your web server to have more than one hard drive so that there's always more than one copy of your data on the server.  Therefore it can just keep on running even if one drive fails.

You want a stable Operating System like Linux or FreeBSD.

You don't want to share a server with too many other people so not to make it unstable.

And you want at least daily backups of your data.  This is usually onto tape.  Often DAT tape.

And you also want offsite backups.  What this means is if your hosting company is backing up all information onto tape nightly, they should also keep an up to date copy (weekly at least) of the backups offsite too.

If any data is lost from the servers, they should be able to back it up from the nightly backups.

And if the worst happens and there's a fire at the hosting company and the backup tapes are ruined (these things do happen), it's important that there's back up copies off site too - at a completely separate location that can be used for restoration.

A professional hosting company will have all these systems for data redundancy in place because they don't want to lose any data of their customers.

It's also strongly recommended you keep an up to date copy of all web sites on your computer at home or at the office too, and back up this data very regularly to a second hard drive and even to CD or DVD.  Also consider keeping copies at a separate location too.

If you're serious about your online business, you'll be very serious about the uptime of your web sites and that there's multiple copies of your websites that can quickly be restored.  You want the minimum amount of downtime for all of your sites, since downtime loses you potential customers.

As an example:

Before I learnt this lesson and was hosting at a lower end hosting company, someone did a big promotion for one of my sites quickly bringing a lot of visitors to my sales page.

Well, after an hour of the promotion starting my web site went offline, and remained offline for around six hours.

Therefore around 75% of those visitors couldn't reach my site and the promotion was pretty much wasted.

So spend the time finding the right hosting company so that you don't have to learn these lessons the hard way.

I know I've mentioned it several times but I do recommend Pair.com since after moving from one hosting company to another, I can't see myself moving my sites from them unless their quality of service greatly deteriorates.

They've been fine for around a year, and hopefully things should continue like that.

There has been a lot of consolidation in the web hosting industry recently, and sometimes you'll find you're hosting your sites with a great company, and then they get bought out by another company (or start making acquisitions which distracts their attention from their core business) and their hosting service suffers as a result.

I've seen this happen many times.  And even though Pair.com is around 7 years old as I write this (very mature for an online company) they're not looking for acquisitions nor do I believe they're interested in being acquired.  I feel this is a good sign.

Part 1 - An Introduction

Part 2 - What Exactly Is a Web Server?

Part 3 - Your Web Server Memory and Operating System Options

Part 4 - Bandwidth, and Backups

Part 5 - More About Backups, And How To Monitor Your Sites Automatically

Part 6 - Databases, Unmanaged Hosting, and More...