Understanding Bandwidth & Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

At one time bandwidth was a very serious consideration for hosting a website but it has become such a cheap commodity that most people can ignore it now. I said, most people, not all.

As a website hosting company we buy dedicated fiber optic lines capable of transferring a certain amount of data from our datacenter to the Internet service providers. These lines are sometimes referred to as "Pipes" just like a water pipe coming into your home, you can pump a certain amount of water per minute through that pipe.

In the case of electrical power, most homes have a 200 AMP service or the ability to use 200 amps of power at any given time. That does not mean that the power company expects you to use 200 Amps and if everyone does, they don't have enough power to supply everyone.

In extreme cases, companies have to have rolling blackouts where they shut power to entire areas so that they have enough to supply the remaining customers and move that blackout area every few hours so everyone gets a fair supply of power because there is only a limited amount they can produce.

When we talk about bandwidth the same is true. Fiber or pipes can only carry a limited amount of data, typically 1GIG per fiber pair and to get more you need more fiber pairs.

The problem is, if you don't have the fiber in place you can't just turn it on when you need more.

Just like the 200 amp service on your home, if you need 300 amps, the wires cannot support it and the breakers will just shut off if you exceed 200 amps.

If you need more power, it takes time to add more lines, costs more money and you have to pay for someone to install it. To run new fiber to a datacenter it typically takes 3-6 months just like installing a bigger service in your home.

Well, hosting providers have to meter their bandwidth so they can supply everyone with enough data transfer. If you use over a certain amount, they might shut you off to prevent everyone from being offline.

This is when you see the dreaded message "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded". This means that the hosting provider is metering or measuring the bandwidth your website is using over the course of your billing period and you exceeded your limit. So now nobody can get to your website, because you ran out of bandwidth.

Lets look at this in more common terms. You have an apartment with 5 roommates and they all want to take a shower before work. But the apartment only has a 10 gallon water heater.

The first 2 people have great hot showers and head off to work. The next person only has a luke warm shower and gets a little chilled, the next person has an ice cold shower because there is no hot water left in the tank and it wont be hot for a few more hours. The last person is just too scared to get in because it is too cold.

When your website plan allows you 10 gallons of hot water or in hosting terms, 100MB of bandwidth each website visitor uses up a small portion of that just like the people taking showers.

In order for the hosting provider to be able to supply the thousands of clients that are hosted, when you use up that 100MB, they turn off the hot water and put out a sign that says, Bandwidth Limit Exceeded. Until they get to the next billing cycle and refill their tank with more bandwidth.

Now this is not a perfect system by any means, but that is what many companies have to do to distribute their data fairly. They can sell you more bandwidth, but that costs more money.

So how much do you need?

Websites like youtube.com use millions of dollars in bandwidth each month while websites like thenameofyourbusiness.com might only use a few dollars in bandwidth each month.

So how do you know what you need?

Well, you know you are not a youtube, so you probably don't need that much. But still you do need some.

Today the cost of bandwidth is very low compared to 10 years ago so companies can offer unlimited plans which results in far less instances of "Bandwidth Limit Exceed" notices on websites.

But they can't possibly give you unlimited bandwidth, because they just don't have unlimited bandwidth coming in.

When they say unlimited, they mean it in the context that they will not limit or charge for what you use, but not that you get to use an unlimited amount. They are using the term as an adverb and not an adjective and that is important or the term unlimited would just be false advertising.

If you think that is confusing, you would be right.

But if you think of it as a pipe or a water hose, there is only so much water that can pass. If you hook the hose up to 5 houses and only one is using water, everything is great, water pressure is fine. But when the second house opens the water now each house only have 1/2 of the water. So the water in house #1 slows down. Add house #3 with an open water hose and each only gets 1/3 of the water. As more users open the water at their homes less and less comes through until eventually there is just not enough water for anyone.

This is exactly what happens with bandwidth. There is only so much, you get enough users and nothing happens.

To manage this problem hosts ave to cut someone off. Either limit how much each website can use or suffer all websites being unavailable.

If you run a video sharing website, you will no doubt exceed the bandwidth limits of your website host very quickly. Video requires a huge amount of bandwidth and is banned by most hosts that offer unlimited hosting.

This brings up the point, if you host promised you unlimited bandwidth what do you really get?

First, anyone that promises more than they can actually deliver based on their expectation that you will never use it, is probably not someone you want to deal with.

Airlines do that all the time, they oversell flights because they know that 10% of the people wont show up. But when the people do show up, there are not enough seats on the plane for the ticks they sold, so someone has to stay behind.

If you host a website where they offer unlimited bandwidth it is all too common to be turned off if you exceed the levels they predict.

I know this, because it has happened to me.

I signed up for unlimited hosting only to be told I could not have more than 10 visitors at one time on any of my websites and I needed to activate a module that would limit my website to 10 users.

Any more than 10 and they get a message that the website is not available.

So I learned the hard way that bandwidth is in fact important and should not be ignored.

As a datacenter, we pay for all the bandwidth whether we use it or not, so to make money we have to maximize the usage. If we buy too much, we waste money, if we buy too little, websites can't be viewed.

In our case, we manage our own software, the types of sites and the numbers of products and pages so we can keep the sites open without any issues.

If we allowed everyone to upload unlimited videos our costs would go way up and we would have to charge more to provide the same service to our core customers without those video sharing websites.

So we have structured our business model to prevent anyone from every having to worry about bandwidth.

But that is not the same at other hosting companies.

In many cases, they just make up policies to shut off bandwidth hogs and keep the lower cost customers that the make money on. But this is a very bad business model.

People spend thousands of dollars paying webmasters to build website, programmers and such and then later find out, they are using too much bandwidth and were turned off by the hosting company that promised unlimited everything for $2.95 a month.

Common Sense

If you understand that sites like youtube spend millions on bandwidth then you should realize that $2.95 or even $10 is not going to buy very much. Don't expect to run much on one of those cheap websites.

Sure, a personal home page, a fan website or maybe a website for your kid's little league team. But if the site is important you need to make sure it is up 24/7 and that means learning about bandwidth, limits and usage.

It is not really that complicated.

If you buy ten, one gallon jugs of water, when you use them, they are empty. If you buy hosting with 10MB per month, when you use it, it is gone.

The big problem is, robots and crawlers can eat up bandwidth like parasites. Hundreds of bots can download the entire website each day and you never have one live customer. That can severely drain your water supply or bandwidth so you need to understand more than the fact that you only have a few customers.

Bandwidth is Related To the Number of Pages

The amount of bandwidth you use will be closely related to the number of pages that you have. That is simply because when your pages are crawled by bots, they crawl each page and download each image.

If you have around 1000KB per page and have 2000 product pages, one single bot can use up 2MB of your bandwidth not to mention overload the CPU witch is a other issue altogether.

However, if you only have 1 page at 1000KB each bot will only use 1/2000 of the bandwidth.

So the bigger your website the more bandwidth you need to feed the bots.

Of course the same is true wit customers although most customers will not look at 2000 pages but they might look at 20 or 50 pages. If you only have a 5 page website you will use much less bandwidth than website with 50 or 100 pages.

Number of Visitors

Of course the real factor in bandwidth is traffic. The more people that come to your website the more bandwidth you use. If you run a SuperBowl commercial and have 1 million people go to your website then you need a load of bandwidth. If you run a TV commercial on the local news and 50 people go to your website then you obviously need less.

Ask your Website Host

The best way to know what you need is to discuss the issue with your website host. And by that, I don't mean a sales person or a support person, they tell you everything is fine no matter what.

Speak with a system administrator that knows what the severs can handle and discuss what your traffic levels will be, the size of your pages, the content you will deliver and other relevant details and the technician will be able to quickly calculate how much bandwidth you will need and what plan is right for you.

Just like any website or business, it pays to plan ahead. The more information you have, the better prepared you are the easier it will be to understand when problems like exceeding bandwidth levels start affecting your website.