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Budgeting for bandwidth

Bandwidth is the space in which your online store thrives - but what's it all about and how much do you need?

The Internet has a lot in common with our road network. Just as cars travel on motorways, A-roads, B-roads and dusty farm tracks, so the Internet has fibre-optic bacKBones, and modem connections. And just like the road network, there's a fixed amount of capacity - or bandwidth - online; while the M25 crawls to a halt at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, so the Web has its blackspots. Too much traffic means things go slow.

Unlike the road network, however, if you need more bandwidth on the Internet then you can buy it. We're all aware of the joys of broadband and how great that makes surfing, but how about actually hosting your site? How much bandwidth will you need in the opposite direction - from your server to your customers? What if you exceed it? How can you make sure you have enough to cope?

Bandwidth is important because every time someone visits your site, they "borrow" part of your hosted server space in order to view it. How much bandwidth you need is therefore determined by how big your site is (in terms of pictures, graphics and html files) and how many visitors you expect.

THUS, through its Demon brand, offers a wide variety of hosting options, designed to address your hosting needs. These reflect the fact that not everyone has a site that's under huge demand and therefore requires a vast amount of bandwidth. However, if you do have a large site or you operate a technically-advanced store that uses a lot of bandwidth (perhaps it's database-driven or uses a lot of Flash) then there's also a good range of structured hosting options Demon can offer.

At the basic level there's the standard Demon users' homepage - the one that everyone gets when they open their account with us. The maximum amount of bandwidth on that is 150MB per day - if you exceed that for three days running then your Web access is suspended until you show that you've sorted your bandwidth demands. That 150MB might seem like a lot, but consider that an average Web page is usually upwards of 300KB these days and if the site's image-heavy or sprawls over a lot of pages then you're likely to trip that limit. Demon homepage Web space is great for small hobby sites or family pages, but not your best bet if you're running a commercial operation.

Finally, if you'd like to use your own server, then THUS, through its Demon brand, also offers a co-location facility. This enables you to buy or build your own server box, equipped in any way you want and then physically house it at one of THUS's highly secure hosting centres. Pricing for these is based on the nuMBer of racks, committed bandwidth, contract term and any additional services.

Needless to say, then THUS, through its Demon brand, are very flexible when it comes to your hosting set-up. If you discover that your shop's become a roaring success and you're chewing your way through your bandwidth, then you can simply upgrade to a higher-capped tariff. The secret is to carefully track your bandwidth usage through your server logs. Check them every week and you'll be able to see if you're paying for too much or perhaps too little bandwidth.

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