An online business needs an efficient and stable website, which is why choosing a hosting provider is so important. With the right host, a business will benefit from stable up-time, plenty of storage and bandwidth, and fast servers that allow for speedy page loading. With the wrong package, an online business could quickly run into issues that could reduce income and growth.
Any small or medium-sized business owner will need to understand all of the basic terms and features of a professional web hosting package. The following information will help to clarify the difference between bandwidth and storage when related to business web hosting.
Hosted Storage for a Website
A number of hosting providers have moved to models where an unlimited amount of storage is offered. This effectively allows businesses to create websites without restriction on how much content is being hosted. Whether the site is a few hundred megabytes or more than a gigabyte, an unlimited storage plan won’t place any restrictions in terms of storage size. For some lower tiered plans for startup websites, storage is often capped, sometimes as low as one or two gigabytes and if it’s unlimited storage, it should be limited by the number of files that can be hosted on your hosting account. Here at HostRound we provide resources as promoted, for shared hosting plans, we start from 7GB of SSD storage and up to unlimited gigabytes for the higher plans.
The average website will not contain more than a few hundred megabytes of information, especially with the existence of CDN which help increase website speed and cache the static files and serve them from many servers across the globe which decrease the number of requests and traffic consumed on your hosting account and improve the user experience. However, storage doesn’t just relate to the site itself, but also the content management system, any backups that are stored, and any other resources that are saved but not specifically used on the publicly facing website (additional downloadable resources etc.).
For any business today, an unmetered hosting solution is recommended. While most hosting providers are generous in what they offer on limited plans, it makes more sense and will assist in futureproofing when an unmetered storage solution is chosen.
Bandwidth for Business Websites
Bandwidth and storage are sometimes confused, but they are actually two very different things. Storage, as we’ve covered, relates to all data that is stored on a website through a hosting provider.
Bandwidth relates to the amount of data that is sent to and from the website. As an example: when somebody accesses a website, they are effectively downloading that data from the hosting provider. This accumulates and makes up the amount of bandwidth that is used. If a single webpage is 5 megabytes in size, and it is viewed by 1000 people per month, then at least 5 gigabytes of bandwidth will be used. The actual figure will be slightly higher than the file sizes, because bandwidth includes traffic to and from the web server.
To put it simply, more bandwidth means more users can access a website, and it’s important to consider that users can view a page more than once. If a site were 100 megabytes in total size, and every aspect of the site were accessed by users in a month, then the total bandwidth used by 1000 users would be in excess of 500 gigabytes.
Even if all of the numbers are ignored, businesses owners can relate to bandwidth by thinking of it as traffic. Limited bandwidth means a limited amount of traffic, which means a site could become inaccessible as bandwidth runs out. Much like storage, it is highly recommended that business website owners choose a plan where bandwidth is either in excess of one terabyte, or unmetered.
More is Better When It Comes to a Business Website
Sure, not every business will require unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth, however, having too much is always more desirable than not having enough.
Pages are increasingly becoming more content-rich, and this means that websites are larger than they ever were before. Even as certain page elements become more efficient and smaller in terms of total file size, there are still resources like video, audio, and even downloadable programs or documents that can quickly inflate a site’s bandwidth and storage usage.
Modern business owners have plenty of affordable unmetered (and high allowance) solutions available today, so it’s always best to aim for the most generous hosting packages that are within budget.