What is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth in web hosting refers to the amount of data that can be transferred between your server and visitors over a given period. It determines how much traffic your website can handle and is typically measured in gigabytes (GB) per month.
How Does Bandwidth Work?
Every time someone visits your website, data is transferred from your server to their browser — HTML files, images, videos, scripts, and stylesheets all consume bandwidth. A page that is 2MB in size visited 10,000 times uses about 20GB of bandwidth. Sites with heavy media content or high traffic need more bandwidth.
Most hosting plans include a monthly bandwidth allocation, with shared plans typically offering 10GB to unlimited bandwidth. "Unlimited" usually has fair-use policies. If you exceed your allocation, the host may charge overage fees or throttle your site. CDNs can significantly reduce bandwidth usage by caching and serving content from edge servers closer to visitors.