Can someone please explain "bandwidth" to me. I thought I understood it to mean the total download amount, but now I am not sure if that is the correct meaning.

Many say that "hits", "data transfer", and "bandwidth" are all the same. How is "bandwidth" calculated? Does it include email, ftp, etc.?

...and how does 1 MBPS of bandwidth compare to 1 GB of bandwidth?

... and how do you double-check and dispute bandwidth if you think you were overcharged? It appears that would be hard to prove.

--chrisb

My Math could be wrong, but I believe 1GB=1000MB, assuming that is so then if you have only one page on your site and the size is 1MB and your bandwidth is 1GB per month, then you page can be viewed or "hit" 1000 times in one month.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong!

1 Mbps is 1 Mega bit per second, which is about 360 GB per month. 1GB transfer is 1000 MB transfer which is usually being used to quantify the traffic or data transfer allowance.

So, if you see a package that says 10GB/month data transfer or traffic, it means that you can transfer your data over the internet up to 10GB total in one month.

Hope this helps :)

bandwidth is real easy to explain but it's also real easy to use to fool people with.

so let's start by some basic's

bandwidth = traffic

traffic is the movement of bit's of data between 2 computers.

the data can be many things
ftp, email, web traffic ( http ) ....


what is 1 gigabyte
it is about 1,000,000,000 bytes of data ( about not exactly )

what is mbps ?
here is a gotcha.
I've seen MBPS mean mega-byte per second or
mega-bit per second
800 % difference between the bit rate and the byte rate
same thing with Kbps and KBPS ( kilo-bits or bytes )

and 1 Mbit per second = about 320 gigs of bandwidth

Dispute resolution is not easy on the user level because you as the user don't see everything ( e-mail, ftp traffic ) but you see the http traffic. but at the server level you can run your own reports and compair them to the service provider

the platform we use tracks alot of it and reports' it to the clients so it has solved that problem entirely. and so that you know, INbound spam counts against your allocation of bandwidth and disk space.

side note and off topic but important I think :
Spam and the cost to users and host
on average I have seen on the low side about 5 spams per day that make it past the filters. each spam is about ( average ) 12k in size that is about 60k in spam per domain. now if you host 500 domains that is about 30 megs of disk space lost to spam per day on average.
or about 1 gig of disk space lost for usage per month and about 2 gigs of bandwidth lost per month ( inbound and outbound )

That is why most host try to fight spam because we have users that don't pick up thier mail for 3 or 4 days and if they get above average spam ( i get personally about 30 spams per day, I filter most of it and use it for the filters ) the mail server will get full.

back to on topic

Hit's well that's hard to explain because it depends on the design of your web site. so I'll let someone else that can explain it. could someone plese issue the comment ( i have it in my head but lack the words for it )

Mike

In addition to what Mike said, usually MBps means Mega Byte per second, and Mbps is Mega Bit per second. The difference is the capital b.

And for correction, Mike is right. 1 Mbps is about 320 GB/month. :)

1 GB = 1024 MB
1 MB = 1024 KB
1 KB = 1024 B
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1 Mbps (not the lowercase) = 1/8 MBps (not uppercase) as there are 8 bits to one byte...