Which plan do I need? Hint: Start with any of our hosting plans,  it's easy to upgrade later, there are no "hard" limits. We will notify you and you may then upgrade easily. We never turn off your site. If you plan to have many photos or graphics choose pro plan 2.  Relax and don't worry, more then plenty of space and bandwidth for most sites.

Setting up a hosting account is like purchasing a house. You must decide how much space you need, how close to major transportation routes you need to be, and what other features are important to you. Pretty simple right? Not quite.

Many of you have probably heard that the amount of bandwidth usage or data transfer allocated with a hosting plan is an important aspect to consider, but what exactly is it?

The term bandwidth refers to how much data can be moved at one time from a web server out onto a network and across the Internet. You can think of bandwidth as the diameter of a water pipe. The bigger the diameter of the pipe, the more water you can move, even if the water is moving at the same speed.

Data transfer (AKA bandwidth usage) refers to how much data/information is sent to or received from your hosting account on the server over a specified period of time. In most cases data transfer is measured monthly. Looking back at the water pipe we used before, data transfer would be the measure of how much water has actually flowed through our pipe over a given period of time.

Every time someone views your web page all of the data (html code, text, graphics, etc.) incorporated within the page must be transferred from the web server, across the Internet, and onto the visitor's computer where it is viewed via a web browser. As a result, the amount of data transfer a hosting customer uses is directly related to the number of visitors to their site, multiplied by the size of their web pages, including any graphics displayed.

In most cases it is these graphics and other multimedia files which account for the vast majority of data transfer used. This becomes apparent when you consider that the average text page consists of only of about 5 Kb of data, while images can be as large as 50-200 Kb in size -- and many images are often used on each  web page.

Macromedia flash files are often very large, along with audio and video files. Live audio and video feeds can also be incredibly bandwidth intensive.

It is important to note that most hosting companies will also include e-mail and FTP transfers towards your monthly data transfer totals. As a result, if you plan on maintaining a mailing list or allowing your visitors to download large files (such as graphics or software) you should plan accordingly when attempting to judge your monthly level of data transfer.

OK, so now you know what data transfer is, but how is it measured and how much will you use?

Measurement is usually done in units of kilobytes (KB) which can easily be converted to megabytes or gigabytes. See the table on the right side of the page for unit conversions.

It's hard to know how much data transfer a site will use without looking at it specifically, but in most cases it is very rare for a personal or small business site to use more than 5 gigabyte (GB) of data transfer in a month (and most won't use anywhere near that much).

The exceptions to this rule are generally sites that distribute graphics, provide large file downloads, or offer adult content. These types of sites may use as much as 100 times the data transfer a personal web site would.

Some professional sites, usually those with at least 10,000 visitors each day, may find themselves using more then 30 GB per month or more.