Do We Still Care About Bandwidth And Server Load?
Make sure network capacity is sufficient for your website
Please note: This article was written from the perspective or a website developer. I am not a networking or HTTP expert and this article is designed for people who have general responsibility for running websites. Feel free to leave any comments below.
Introducing Two Old Friends
Bandwidth and server load are two factors that can affect your ability to run a website.
Bandwidth actually has two meaning when refering to running a website. Firstly it can mean the network capacity for web traffic back and forth at a given time, i.e. how much data can be transferred per second.
Alternatively it means the amount of data that is allowed to be transferred in a specific interval, such as one month. Both are important when running a website. As files are uploaded and downloaded, emails exchanged, and web pages accessed, network bandwidth is being used.
Total monthly bandwidth is a cap that all hosting companies place on sites in order to share the total network capacity equally between all the sites. Cheap webhosting is available because hosting companies can cram multiple websites onto a single server. For sites with relatively low traffic and data demand, this “shared” hosting is perfect. It is cheap, but sufficient resources are available to run your site smoothly. Hosting companies monitor sites in order to keep one site from accidentally or deliberately consuming all the network capacity.
Even websites on dedicated or virtual private hosting will have a bandwidth limit, but they will be significantly more generous than the limits on shared hosting.
Server load is a much less commonly discussed subject. It refers to CPU utilisation on the server that hosts the website. The CPU (central processing unit) is the component in a computer that processes information and commands from programs, ordering memory to be used a certain way, moving files from one place to the next and more. For example, every time MySQL needs to access and process some information from the database, the CPU will perform all the calculations.
Server load is displayed as a number usually in the format x.xx. The aim is for the server load to be as low as possible. Basically, a higher server load means the server is under pressure to do more work.
There is no cut off as to what is an acceptable server load and what isn’t, but it generally accepted that your server load can increase by 1 for every CPU your server has and all should be OK. For example, if your server has 1 CPU a server load up to 1.00 is OK. Whereas if your server has 3 CPUs the server load is acceptable up to 3.00.
Memory capacity on any computer is limited. In a perfect world, every component of a server would get access to as much of the CPU as they needed. Unfortunately this cannot always be the case. Special operating system functions control how the processing time is shared out among all the competing processes. The server load indicates how “in demand” the server currently is. It constantly changes and will ebb and flow throughout the day.
But Is It Important
While keeping an eye on your bandwidth usage and server load is not the most important, or most exciting, or administrative tasks, it is still important. If you use up all your bandwith your webhost could potentially charge you a lot of money. Even worse, your website could be unavailable until you get the problem sorted out.
It is completely unacceptable to run out of bandwidth and if you ever get as close as using 75% of your available bandwidth, get the situation sorted immediately. All you need is for your site to get popular on Digg or Stumble Upon and you could potentially use a huge amount of bandwidth in a short period of time. If those visitors start receiving a message that your site has run out of bandwidth, you are losing out on a great many number of visitors.
High bandwidth plans are extremely cheap these days.
Server load is beyond your control. You don’t have any influence on how many websites are crammmed onto a single server or what the high demand times are for those sites.
Conclusions
After exploring bandwidth and server load our conclusions are quite clear. In this day and age of super cheap hosting there is simply no excuse for running out of bandwidth. We have also learned that server load is important, but we have no control over it. If you find that your server has a consistently high server load, it is time to consider to moving to a new host, or perhaps looking for VPS hosting.
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