Bandwidth

When your server is connected to the Internet the speed of the site, i.e. how fast it responds to requests will depend on the bandwidth. Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between the web site and the rest of the Internet. The amount of bandwidth provided to a server is determined by the size of the network connections.

The rate at which the bandwidth of a site is used will depend not only upon how busy the site is, but also the type of files that are typically being accessed by visitors. For example a web page containing an HTML file may only be around 50KB in size, whilst an MP3 song might be around 4MB.

So if you anticipate your web site generating lots of traffic and/or containing large files then you will require a high bandwidth connection to the Internet. Failure to provide this will result in poor performance. If you opt for an in-house web server solution then you will also have to consider the cost of providing this high speed connectivity. On the other hand if you choose the ISP route, then the cost of the connection should be reduced as it is split over the customer base.

Ensuring that your web server has sufficient bandwidth to deal adequately with user demand should be a key element of the web hosting strategy.