Bandwidth and server load are words that are going to be a part of your vocabulary very soon if you have your own website. These two terms refer to the performance of your site, and they matter a great deal to every website owner.

Bandwidth is affected by the number of visitors you have to your site, at any given time, and what those visitors are doing. For example, 100 visitors all trying to watch a video at the same time will require a great deal of bandwidth, while ten or fifteen visitors viewing a textual webpage at the same time would require very little bandwidth.

Bandwidth essentially refers to the amount of processor resources the operation of your website requires. When you have a Web Hosting account, you most likely pay for a specific amount of bandwidth per month. If you exceed that amount of bandwidth, you usually have to pay a very high price for it.

Bandwidth is used when people access your webpages, when you send or receive email through your email account associated with that site, when videos are viewed, audios are listened to, and even when you upload files to your server. All of this uses your allotted bandwidth.

Web Hosting companies monitor all of the sites that they host for their bandwidth usage. They must do this to prevent customers from using the resources that are needed to make sure that all sites on the server are operating properly. This is why they impose such high penalties when you exceed your bandwidth – because it literally affects their business in terms of unhappy customers. If your site is hogging all of the bandwidth available, the other customers sites won’t work properly.

Server load is also vastly important. Server load refers to the utilization of the Central Processing Unit – or CPU – on the server. Everything that happens on the server utilizes the CPU. But server load includes more than the CPU. It also includes all of the other components in the server computer, such as the hard drives.

When a person visits your site, and tries to watch the video on your site, that video is located on the hard drive, and loaded within the web browser. This utilizes the hard drive, the memory, and the CPU. If there are too many requests at one time – across the server, not just from your site – it can literally cause the server to ‘overload’ and shut everything down.

There may be times that you notice that your webpages are not loading as fast as they normally do. This is typically because of the server load at that time. This may be because there are numerous visitors on your site, keeping the server busy, or because there are numerous visitors on someone else’s site, if they share the server with you.

Sharing a server with other sites is very common, as this is the least expensive Web Hosting that one can get. When you are sharing a server, and someone else’s site is putting too much of a load on the server, the Web Hosting Company will generally do something about it – once they know about the problem. You can also request to be moved to a new server.

A dedicated server, on the other hand, isn’t affected by anyone else’s site. All of the resources – bandwidth and server load – are dedicated to your website. This is why dedicated hosting tends to cost a great deal more than shared hosting.

Again, when you become a website owner, you will be introduced to an entirely new vocabulary. Don’t be overwhelmed by it. Most of the terms that you will encounter are very easily explained, and easy to understand. Overall, the terms bandwidth and server load, however, are the ones that will matter the most to you.

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