Published on April 20, 2011 Medium to large store? Don’t get caught out on bandwidth
Bandwidth represents the amount of traffic to your website. If you’re a medium to heavy traffic store what type of solution will you choose?
One place where people setting up a new store get unstuck is on bandwidth. If you don’t have a technical background, how are you meant to make an informed decision about how much bandwidth you need? And even more importantly, what happens when you run out?
Bandwidth works just like your monthly usage at your ISP. Every single thing you upload or download from your site, whether it’s an image, product description, admin page or report, you are using bandwidth. So how much you need is affected by the number of products in your store, how often you update your store and product images, and how actively you manage your store.
Bandwidth is easily confused with disk space but the difference between the two is that bandwidth is a monthly measure of your usage, and disk space is the total size of everything you have stored. To think of a real world example, think of disk space as the amount of warehouse space that your total stock uses, and the traffic as how much you sell every month.
There’s no set formula to determining how much bandwidth you need because the amount you use depends on the size of your product images, how many visitors you get to your store, and how actively the images in your store are changed and turned over. Emails are also counted in your bandwidth limits, so it also depends on how many emails you send and receive as well.
How we make bandwidth management easy
At Ozcart, we try to make it as easy as possible to manage your bandwidth by:
- setting a generous bandwidth limit for all packages based on the number of products in your store and our experience about typical usage.
- not charging for bandwidth overruns – instead you get the option to upgrade packages and don’t get bill shocks
- for large stores: we have very generous limits without sacrificing performance, and our Enterprise package allows up to 150GB of traffic per month. Our enterprise packages are also on semi dedicated servers, to further improve performance. Our servers are already using high performing Intel Xeon multi-processor CPUs with a large allocation of memory, and fast network connections as well.
- We also keep it simple by measuring bandwidth on a calendar month for everyone, and not your individual billing cycle. Please note that every provider is different and it’s worth checking what your provider uses if you have a shop with someone else.
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