What Is Bandwidth?

"Bandwidth" shows up on every hosting plan, but it's rarely explained well. Here's what it actually means.

Bandwidth is how much data your site can send

Think of bandwidth as the amount of data your website can deliver to visitors in a given month. Every time someone loads your page, the images, text, and code are "sent" to them — and that uses bandwidth.

A simple analogy

Imagine bandwidth as a water pipe. A wider pipe can carry more water at once. A site with more bandwidth can handle more visitors and more traffic.

• A small site with a few visitors uses very little.
• A busy site with lots of images and many visitors uses a lot.

What counts as bandwidth?

• Each page load sends data to the visitor.
• Images and videos use the most.
• A site with lots of visitors or big media files uses more bandwidth.

That's why you might see "unlimited bandwidth" on a plan — it means you're not billed per gigabyte. But even "unlimited" plans have fair-use limits so one site doesn't hog the whole server.

Do you need to worry about it?

For most small businesses, not really. A typical business site uses a tiny fraction of a plan's bandwidth. You'd only run into limits with heavy traffic or large media files — and even then, you can upgrade your plan.

Related: see What is SSD storage? for the other thing that scales between plans, and How much does hosting cost?.