What is the Difference between Storage and Bandwidth?

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What is the Difference between Storage and Bandwidth?
Updated On: October 25, 2023

Storage and Bandwidth – Both personal users and businesses today feel the need to understand their data requirements. Because of a growing number of storage mediums, managing all of your data is one of the issues today. On the other hand, more data is being created every day. Even by conservative estimates, the advancement in technology in terms of smart electronic devices, social media and other advanced platforms have resulted in extensive growth of the number of online users. All of these statements boil down to a singular idea. This is the idea that users today need to understand how to manage this exponential growth of data.

To do this, the first step is understanding how much data you’ll need to manage. The second is understanding where to store this data. In the context of web hosting, storage space and bandwidth become the central factors that will determine your data requirements. So, what exactly is storage space and bandwidth?

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Storage Space and Web Hosting

Within the context of web hosting, storage is simply the amount of data you will store on your website. The ability to store this data on the internet exists through the use of servers. Servers help users store data on the internet. The capacity of your servers to manage data will determine your storage.

Storage is always limited in nature. This is because the numbers of running servers in any data center are physical systems. The more servers you have, the more storage space you have available. Even services offering unlimited online storage space scale data centers to a large extent. This ensures that the customer is provided enough space that they never run out.

Calculating storage requirements for your website also means taking into account the files needed to create your website. These files are also stored on servers. So to understand how much storage you need for your website, take into account the nature of the website. In this context, we’ll consider websites made for business use.

The primary advantage available within web hosting is the ability to scale. This means that users can simply increase storage space as requirements grow. Most of the time, users require more storage as the number of online website users increase. This implies that when your storage needs are growing, your business is also growing.

Businesses should always purchase storage based on their personal requirements. If the website is a blog posting site, then the chances are that you won’t need more than 10 GB of storage. However, consider your website has several videos on it. This implies that you will need at least 2 TB of storage space.

Users today can either run their own servers or purchase storage space from third party vendors. Businesses can drive down costs by managing their own servers. But, more resources and time will be required to manage it. If your purchase storage from a vendor such as Backup Everything or Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can save time and resources in managing it.

Bandwidth and Web Hosting

Bandwidth and Web Hosting

While bandwidth and storage are terms that can often be intermixed, they are not the same thing. Unlike storage, bandwidth relates to the amount of data transfer. More specifically, the amount of data being sent back and forth from a website is bandwidth. It is measured for a specific amount of time.

To measure the amount of bandwidth required, users should start by understanding bandwidth transfer rates. You can start by calculating how much data is being transferred within a single second. Such as, the bandwidth needed for a standard gigabyte connection is 125 megabytes per second.

Within web hosting, users should start by estimating the number of average users that visit the website. This will help estimate how much bandwidth is required. Say a total of 1000 people visit your website in a month. If this is the case, estimates for your bandwidth will be at least 5 gigabytes consumed in a month.

Keep in mind that the actual bandwidth purchased for your website should be higher than the actual needed. This is because the website can crash if more than an average number of users visit the site. Usually, businesses use bandwidth at least 3 times the actual storage.

A simple example to understand website bandwidth can be traffic on a road. Suppose a total of 2500 cars need to go through a certain path to get to their destination. The road will be built corresponding to this figure. However, an efficient strategy would be planning for 3000 cars. This is so that in case of more cars come on the road, traffics jams can be avoided.

In the context of web hosting, traffic jams are equivalent to web sites crashing. This is why it is important for businesses to buy more bandwidth. Most businesses today should opt for an excess amount or unlimited bandwidth to avoid user inconvenience.

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Estimating Storage and Bandwidth for your Business Website

It’s always important to prioritize the customer experience. In this case, the customer is the end-user accessing your website. Quality customer experience would be an ease in using your business website. This means that a user should never experience a website to be unresponsive or slow.

In case of low storage and bandwidth, your website can easily crash. Even when the website is being used at its maximum capacity, it can become unresponsive. This is why it’s important to calculate how much web space needed. In this case, planning for the worst-case scenario implies purchasing excess amount of storage and bandwidth. Most web hosting storage and bandwidth providers offer an unlimited amount. Modern businesses should worry less about price gaps and aim for user convenience above all, while remaining smart when considering storage and bandwidth for their website.

What is the Difference between Storage and Bandwidth?

Saaher Muzafer / CEO Backup Everything
Saaher Muzafer / CEO Backup Everything

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