Bandwidth
Bandwidth (data transfer) is usually measured in gigabytes. A gigabyte is roughly one billion bytes. Each letter on this page is one byte. Images can take up a large amount of kilobytes (thousands of bytes), and file downloads can be several megabytes (millions of bytes) in size.
Like most things, bandwidth is not created equally. There are varying degrees of performance delivered by carriers (the actual companies that provide the internet connection). One company may provide expensive, but super-fast connections while another could provide slow but cheap bandwidth. It is good to test it yourself by visiting the web host’s page multiple times throughout the day to see how fast their response loads up. A slow loading website could be a sign of a slow and over-loaded internet connection.
Also like most things, internet connections can break. To ensure that your site does not go down, most hosts use multiple carriers for their internet connection. It is a good thing to look up a host’s network of connection (usually found on its own or in the about section) and see that they have multiple connections. It is also important to note carriers designated as ‘backup connections.’ These carriers are only used when the primary connections go down. So while a web host might have a large network of internet connections, that does not matter if only a couple are actually being used.
