The Difference between and the Importance of Disk Space and Bandwidth
You might have heard of bandwidth and disk space when it comes to web hosting, but you do not know the difference. The two are very crucial because they help to keep a site running in a smooth way on the web. There is no hosting plan that does not have disk space and bandwidth numbers in the offer. Therefore, before you can select any plan it is good to understand the difference that exists between both of them.
Disk space
Disk space also referred as hosting space or data storage is the amount of space on your hosting provider’s server that you can utilise to store graphics, html files, email messages, video/audio and other different kinds of files that you use in your business. Your host provider server will store all of your data until the disk space is full.
All the code comprising your website including the structure also belong here. HTML pages are usually small, photos take a larger space and databases can occupy a large amount of data storage. This means that you must determine the amount of space that you require for your site according to its content.
There is an easy method of calculating the disk space size that you require for your site. All you need to do is to click on the folder that has the website files on your personal computer and select properties. By doing this, you will see the amount of disk space you will use on your server.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth, also known as data transfer, refers to the traffic volume that comes to your website. When people visit your site; their devices connect to your hosting provider’s server to view your website pages. This means data needs to be moved from one location to another. Bandwidth is the amount of data the hosting server will allow a site to send and receive over the web in a certain period of time.
To give an explanation on that, suppose that your site has a single html page with 20kb size and it contains a photo that is 80kb large, you will move 100kb of data for every person who views your website. Therefore, ten visitors would translate to using 1000kb of bandwidth.
The transfers of data are usually measured in terms of gigabytes – you’ll usually be offered billions of bytes every month, and in most cases it is very rare for a small or personal business website to make use of more than a gigabyte of data transfer in one month. It is not easy to estimate your bandwidth as it is to calculate your needed disk space.
Bottom line
To ensure that you get the best services, it is important to have sufficient disk and bandwidth space. Therefore, it is good to get the correct balance or mix between the amount of disk space and bandwidth. If your site is small and you do not expect to sell a lot or do not expect high amount of traffic, then you do not require a large bandwidth and disk space. On the other hand, if you have a site that is ranked at the top of search results, has a large number of affiliates and gets a lot of traffic, then it is good to have a high bandwidth allowance.
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