bandwidth : Java Glossary

The width of the frequency spectrum needed for a data transmission channel. Used more generically to mean data transmission capacity or speed.

Your Website Bandwidth

If you have a website you will be charged about $1 for every gigabyte that visitors to your website download. Even sites that advertise unlimited bandwidth will drop you as a customer if you start using more bandwidth than the average customer. What can you do to cut costs?

• Send your HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) compressed. Accept-Encoding: gzip or SPDY.
• Strip out any comments from your HTML before sending.
• Don’t host any videos. Host them on YouTube. It is amazing YouTube can afford to host them for free.
• Don’t host sound files.
• Prune your downloads of any files the user could easily recreate himself.
• Offer to send large files or groups of files to users on CD by snail mail.

Internet Access Bandwidth

When you sign up for Internet access, the cable company will artificially choke your access speed. You pay more for higher speed access, though often your total downloads measured in gigabytes each month is unlimited so long as you stay within average use range. The main way you would go over the limit is to download a lot of movies or watch a lot of movies online.