What is bandwidth?
Many web hosting companies do not differentiate between Data Transfer and Bandwidth. However, these two are actually two different concepts.
Bandwidth means the amount of data that can be transferred from one point to another while Data transfer is the actual amount of data being transferred. So essentially, Bandwidth is the capacity while Data Transfer is the actual usage.
Because most companies choose not to distinguish between Bandwidth and Data Transfer, they will often measure Bandwidth on the basis of the amount of data per month. For example if your Bandwidth is 10GB/month, the web hosting company will only let you transfer 10GB of data in a month.
You will need the bandwidth for various things, but if you want to reduce the amount of bandwidth you your website needs you can reduce the number of images that you use. This is how it works if you place one large image of 500Kb on your website and if 300 people visit your site each month that means you will need 1.5 GB of data transfer each month just for the image you will need extra bandwidth for the HTML file which serves the image. The bandwidth will continue increasing with each extra image, CSS file or other pages.
So before you choose the a web hosting package estimate the size of your site and the average number of visitors that you may receive in all likelihood each month.
Sometimes new business owners don’t want to spend too much after the Bandwidth of Data Transfer. As easy and simple way to do this is to reduce the number of images on your site or at least go for images which are optimized and so have smaller file sizes. If the images are embedded directly in to the pages you can place them on an external CSS stylesheet which will further help in bringing down the file size. If you reduce the file size your users won’t have to wait too long for the web pages to upload and it will also make updating the styles easy and less time consuming.