Traffic, Transfer and Bandwidth, understand what they are and their differences

There was a time when the many features that hosting plans offered included traffic or transfer and even bandwidth. We are talking about more than 10 years ago. Since then, a lot has changed and not all of them still set limits on these resources. A lot of people don't pay much attention to these important resources, because in fact, they don't really know what it means, what their differences are. Are you one of these?

What is traffic or transfer?

It is more common to find the term traffic listed as one of the features of hosting plans on the market, although some also use the term transfer. Know that in terms of data, they mean exactly the same thing.

The word traffic is neither new nor unknown to most people and if you think of the number of vehicles that travel on public roads and highways, you are right. In terms of computing or the data that circulates on a network, it is the same.

Yes, traffic is the measurement of the volume of data that a computer system handles and, unlike the number of vehicles that circulate, it measures the amount of data entering or leaving a point in the network, in kilobits, kilobytes, megabytes or any of its multiple. Therefore, if at a point on the network, which may be your notebook or a server of the company you work for, 1000 kilobytes arrive in a working day, it is said that they travelled 1 MB (megabyte) of data that day.

In practical terms and with a website hosting account in mind, traffic is the sum of all the data that the account received or sent over a month. A caveat here, as it is common for people to imagine that only visits to the site produce data traffic, when in fact all email messages received and sent, as well as all files sent or downloaded via FTP, are also accounted for as hosting account traffic.

When someone accesses a website, files leave the account towards the device that made the access (download) and each one of these files has a size in KiloBytes (KB). The sum of the size of each downloaded file is the traffic that accesses to the specific page produced. The same happens when you receive an e-mail, which is also size in KB or MB and which is added to the balance of data trafficked so far.

Thus, over the course of a month, a hosting account counts the total data downloaded, resulting from the access to the website pages, the total data from the emails received and sent, as well as the FTP actions of download, upload and FTP commands.

What is bandwidth?

Unlike traffic or data transfer, bandwidth is not a total, but a measure of speed or capacity.

We can still make the analogy with vehicle traffic, although the term bandwidth is not usual in this case. But in the same way, the roads have different capacity for transporting vehicles. Thus, a one-way and simple route has a capacity to dispose of vehicles four times less than a four-lane or lane.

In other words, a four-lane lane allows more vehicles to pass through a given point for an hour than a single lane, considering that both have the same speed limit. In practice, regardless of the number of lanes and the speed that is allowed for vehicle traffic, if the term bandwidth were applicable, it could be said that it is the number of vehicles that can pass through the road in one minute, or one hour or another unit of time.

Seen in terms of computing, the bandwidth is the capacity that two points in the network have to exchange data with each other, that is, how many KiloBytes (KB) or MegaBytes (MB) or GigaBytes (GB) transit between points, each second.

Another point worth mentioning is the conventions used. When talking about networks, among some aspects, a network is referenced for its data transmission capacity or speed and thus, the most common internal networks - domestic or corporate - are called Megabit or Gigabit networks and they are a network whose largest data transmission capacity is 1000 bits per second and 1000000 bits per second, respectively.

If everything has been clear so far, it is easy to deduce that the difference between traffic is the amount of data that one point in the network exchanges with another, and the width is the capacity to make this exchange in a period of time, that is, the maximum speed with that this exchange happens.

Why are traffic and bandwidth important?

You must imagine that the goal of everyone who has a website, is to have a lot of visitation. For this, among other things, you need a robust website based on a well- known CMS and performs e-mail Marketing actions and Content Marketing work. But on the other hand, all of this generates traffic, that is, a lot of data being transferred from your hosting account.

More than that, if you carry out some type of action to boost visitation, as soon as the campaigns are launched, you will see peaks of visitation, which are nothing more than many visitors accessing the site at the same time. When this occurs, in addition to heavy data traffic, it is concentrated in certain periods.

If you do not have good bandwidth, or in other words, you are not able to quickly feed this demand, the pages will take time to be displayed to visitors.

In short, limitations of data traffic and bandwidth are factors that can limit what everyone is looking for, that is, large volumes of visitation and the ability to concentrate this visitation at certain times.

How to solve traffic and transfer problems?

Let's say you are doing an excellent job and your project on the Internet is growing. It has an institutional website, a blog and an online store. In addition, it has a good user base registered in its newsletter, which is sent weekly. Visitation is increasing, sales and partnerships are increasing, but your hosting plan imposes traffic limits that are already being reached. What to do?

The first alternative that most consider, is to seek an unlimited hosting plan . But let's assume that this is not an option to be considered at the moment. In this case, you will have some work, but to a certain extent, it is possible to work around the situation for some time:

Try to optimize all images on the site. Usually, images are the heaviest files and contribute the most to traffic;

If you use a CMS, carefully study the installation/activation of plugins, as well as which ones are best optimized. Although it does not represent a huge data saving, in sites with very high visitation, the whole can represent some improvement, in addition to contributing to a better performance of the site, regardless of visitation;

If there are videos, try to host them on services designed for this purpose, such as Youtube and Vimeo, since this is the type of content that weighs the most in terms of traffic and bandwidth consumption. In addition, these services offer quite good performance;

For high volumes of email marketing, consider using specialized services, since traffic and bandwidth consumption will not be counted from your account, but from the servers of the service used.

Even if a good reduction is achieved in the consumed monthly traffic, as well as in the bandwidth, with actions like the ones above, it is necessary to keep in mind that there is a limit and that the continuous growth of content and visitation, as well as other issues, will make it necessary at some point to seek an unlimited hosting plan or even more appropriate solutions, such as personalized plans or even a VPS.

Conclusion

Traffic or transfer and bandwidth, constitute the volume of data that a hosting account transfer and the capacity that this transfer has to occur over a period of time. These measures are closely related to aspects such as visiting the site and sending and receiving e-mails and FTP, which in a way also represents the measure of growth and the use of hosting services.