How Much Bandwidth Do You Need For Your Site?

The whole world is wired these days. Nearly every business depends upon having the correct bandwidth to stay up and running. The days of being able to dial up to a phone line and get enough connectivity to get by are long gone. The technology that is in regular use today makes heavy demands on network connectivity and bandwidth is at a premium.

When you are considering the issue of how much bandwidth you need for your site, there are more than a few things to think about. You can come up with the right bandwidth solution by being aware of a few things and implementing some smart plans for the future.

Assess Your Current Situation: For companies that are currently on a network or relying on an ISP, it is a smart move to do an honest appraisal of your current situation. Are you regularly experiencing network traffic that slows down or completely takes down your network?

Are applications performing poorly due to a lack of bandwidth? Are your network servers equipped to handle fast Gigabit Ethernet connections? Answering questions like these as thoroughly as you can put you in a better place to make smart decisions about bandwidth in the near future.

The old saying says that you have to know where you are and where you’ve been to be better prepared for where you are going. An assessment of your network usage now will be a valuable tool as you go forward with making decisions in the future.

Business Goals:

Once you have your current report it’s time to think about your short-term and long-term business goals. Do you project a particular level of growth over the next 2 years? How about the next 5 years? Are new applications on the books to be implemented in the next business year? What are the repercussions of these applications operating on your network? Compare the answers to these kinds of questions with the current state of affairs.

If you discovered in the first step that your network is doing OK for now, but have plans to grow a lot over the next 5 years, it may make more sense to implement some network infrastructure changes now to prepare for future bandwidth needs. You will be performing a constant back and forth between these two sets of data, so become comfortable and develop a good system.

Going Back in Time:

Go through your problem records from the past few years. Try to rule out as many root causes to IT problems your company has experienced. How many of those problems were the result of poor bandwidth?

How many of those problems had an impact on bandwidth usage? Is there a recurring few problems that seem to be driven by having inadequate bandwidth for your network? Having the past factored into current and future network needs will help you to get the whole picture about your company’s bandwidth needs.

You may already be at a point where you know you need to increase bandwidth, but aren’t sure how much you will need to add. It’s a good idea for companies that are on 10 or 100 Mbps networks to make the switch to Gigabit Ethernet. Moving data at speeds over a thousand times what they are currently moving at can cause some great improvements for your network and the end users at your company.

The Caring Host offers green web hosting and provides a fair hosting guarantee - The Caring Host does not oversell their servers. Their servers are 130% powered by windmills, 30% more power returned to the grid than is used!