About Bandwidth, Transfer usage, Diskspace
"bandwidth" and "transfer" in addition to "disk space." Understanding what these three terms mean can help you in your decision when picking a web host for your project.
Try this analogy: Imagine you're shipping goods from your warehouse across a highway using trucks to be delievered to customers. Bandwidth is like the number of lanes on the highway. Transfer usage would be the volume (counted number) of goods your trucks took across that highway. Disk space would be the size of your warehouse.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth will determine how fast something loads on your site. Images, videos, and Flash movies will all load quickly with the right amount of bandwidth. Fortunately for you, nearly all hosts have more than enough bandwidth to handle your potential visitor load. (That's why terms like T1, T3, OC-something-or-other are only hidden deep in a FAQ)
The bottleneck (slowdown) in most cases happens between your customer and their Internet provider, meaning the wires between their home or their business (or wireless connection between them and a router or cell tower) and their ISP's data offices. Unless you plan to pay for all your visitors' Internet bills, there is nothing you can do about this bandwidth bottleneck.
Some of your visitors will still be using old-style dial-up modems. Some will be using broadband connections like DSL or cable. Some will be using higher speed fiber optic connections. There are a lot of options for them and a lot of speed differences. If you have a Flash web site, you need to also have a low-bandwidth text version (including some images is usually okay). In the coming years people will be using cell phones and wireless laptop cell adapters more often, so the "speed difference" will continue, not disappear.
Transfer Usage
Transfer volume, measured now in GB (gigabytes) per month, is most definitely your concern, unlike bandwidth bottlenecks that are just your visitor's concern. Let's use an example quickly to imagine what could incur a pricey transfer charge:
Imagine you have a small web site of just 10 MB (megabytes). You have loyal visitors, so for the sake of this example we're assuming they visit all 10 MB of your site every visit. Every visit uses 10 MB of transfer volume. But your site is really great: people tell all their friends, and link to it from their blogs. Suddenly 1,000 people are visiting your site every day.
In our scenario, we have 1,000 daily visitors viewing 10 MB of data. That's about 10,000 MB, or 10 GB (1 GB is about 1,000 MB). This 10 GB is per day, not per month. In a thirty-day month, that's 300 GB of transfer!
Your web hosting package will include a pre-set transfer volume GB limit, or will be labeled as "unlimited." If your plan is "metered" meaning it has a pre-set volume, going over your limit will result in an extra charge for every GB you use over your limit.
Disk Usage
Disk usage, like transfer volume, can be unpredictable. The nice thing about disk space is even if a web site of 10 MB is loaded 10,000 times, it still only uses 10 MB of disk space. It works sort of like running a copying machine. If you're copying a ten-page paper 1,000 times, your original is still just a mere ten pages.
Your disk usage will be different depending on the type of web site you are designing.
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