What is Bandwidth
and Serve Load

• What is bandwidth and serve Load?

You have most likely come across the following two terms used to describe some of the features of a web host plan when you are in the process of choosing the best ecommerce hosting plan:

As you will soon discover these two key factors to server performance will affect each and every site owner at some point or another. So what is bandwidth and sever load?

• Bandwidth definition:

It's the total available network capacity and there are actually two things that are covered by this term which can mean both the capacity for network traffic at any given time or it can mean the amount which is allotted to websites for their usage in a given interval (usually a month).

Bandwidth is used every time that files and emails are transferred across the network, as well as every time a request to load a web page is sent. Let us use an analogy from the world of plumbing to help us better understand our question above "what is bandwidth". Think of a house under construction. A plumber will need a pipe to send water from one point of the house to another. The wider the pipe, the more water it can be able to carry and vise versa.

In the same way, Total monthly bandwidth is a cap on bandwidth usage placed on sites by a web hosting company to keep a handle on the usage of this limited resource. Companies keep an eye on sites to ensure that they are not using all of the capacity of the network. There are also constraints on the simultaneous use of bandwidth, though the "pipes" used by most hosting companies are sufficiently large that this is never really an issue.

• Server load.

Let us now shift to the second part of our question regarding what is bandwidth and server load that any serous website owner should understand. In summary the Server load is a more nebulous concept.

In technical circles, the term refers largely to CPU utilization. The CPU, or central processing unit, is the nerve center of the computer, processing the instructions sent by programs and allocating memory appropriately, as well as moving files around from place to place.

Everything you do on your computer does use some of the CPU's resources and this component is so vital that many use the term to refer to the computer as a whole. The computer has other components of course: disk drive (or drives), memory and so on. However, amongst the less technically minded, server load means the amount of use of all of these components together.

Disk drives might be busy doing the work of fetching data piece by piece and assembling it in memory – all these orders which are managed by the CPU Memory can be a limited resource. Quite often, not all running programs can access all of the memory they need at one time. The operating system will have routines dictating which program gets memory when and how much it gets. In this way, this resource is shared.

Server load is more of a question of how much one or all of these systems are being used at a given time. Why does it matter for you to have a precise answer on this question: "What is bandwidth and serve Load" that we have attempted to answer today, you may ask?

As a site owner, with a serious intent to establish a successful internet marketing business it is good to know and understand why your server is getting slow or not responding and consequently making your pages to load slower when compared to other web pages.

• Knowing all this can help you to make better use of the available resources.

For instance sharing a server with other sites (a very common scenario), other sites' traffic can create server load which affects your website. There's only so much that you can do about this. But if you know that this is the cause, you can ask your web host to move your site to a less loaded server; or if the site causing you problems is acting in an improper manner, you can ask that they be moved, or banned instead.

Having a dedicated server gives you a lot more control over server load. You can craft the HTML of your website, tinker with databases and take other steps to increase throughput. For your users, this means quicker access and a better overall experience on your site. I hope this article has answered our question above, you can read more about what is bandwidth and serve load here