Digital marketing term
Bandwidth
How much data a host will transfer in a period: megabytes and gigabytes out, not headcount. A few heavy videos can exhaust a plan faster than a quiet text site.
Detailed explanation
Bandwidth here is the hosting transfer cap or the pipe’s carrying capacity. Pages, images, video, and API responses all draw down that quota. Unique users can stay low while large files still blow the limit. Mixing this up with ‘traffic’ misreads the invoice.
The usual burn is uncompressed images and autoplay video. Without a CDN every request hits origin. Bots can count against the same gigabytes as humans. When the cap hits, the site slows or returns a 509 / cutoff.
Watch GB used, bot/404 noise, and the heaviest URLs. Put media on a CDN and compress it. Size the plan for campaign peaks, not average daily visits.
Frequently asked questions
- Why can the cap fill without a visitor spike?
- Heavy media, bots, backup downloads, or crawlers consume the same gigabytes. Headcount is not the denominator.
- How does a CDN reduce bandwidth?
- It serves static files at the edge so origin egress drops. Dynamic HTML may still leave your server.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- HostingThe service that keeps a site’s files, database, and mail on a machine reachable from the internet. A domain does nothing until DNS points it at that server.
- Load TimeHow long a page takes to become usable in the browser, measured in milliseconds. A slow first paint raises bounce and wastes both ad clicks and organic visits.
- CMSSoftware that separates content from code so editors can ship pages, images, and URLs as HTML. You should not need an FTP login for every glossary update.
- Core Web VitalsCore Web Vitals is the collective name for three core, user-experience-focused performance metrics Google uses to measure a web page's loading speed, interactivity readiness, and visual stability.
- BrowserThe software that fetches HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and paints the page—Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox. Tracking, login, and speed all differ by browser.
- FTPAn older protocol for moving files between a computer and a server. Themes and backups still travel this way; classic FTP can send passwords in the clear.