What Is Colocation - How Does It Work? > Megabits And Gigabytes

Megabits And Gigabytes

If you currently use hosting, or you've been looking into it, you know that one of the important considerations is how much 'bandwidth' or 'traffic' you get with a given plan - in other words, how busy your site can get. Nearly all hosting plans will specify a fixed amount of bandwidth, usually on a monthly basis, with their plans - the more expensive plans typically getting more bandwidth included. If your site(s) become busy enough to exceed this traffic limit in any given month, you will be assessed an overage, and pay for the difference.

Overwhelmingly, Managed Hosting providers will express these bandwidth limits in units called 'Gigabytes', abbreviated as 'GB'. But if you are evaluating Colocation plans, you will most commonly find bandwidth being expressed in units called 'Megabits', which is common shorthand for Megabits-per-second, abbreviated as 'Mbps'. Some Colocation providers do price bandwidth in GB, but it is less common.




Graph of traffic across a network interface in Megabits-per-second


In contrast, Gigabytes is simply a cumulative total of the bytes of data in and out of a certain point. Theoretically, the number is computed by directly tallying all bytes as they go in and out. In practice, usually one month's worth of traffic will be tallied to arrive at the final number - and to see if it exceeds the Gigabytes per month that was included with your hosting plan.

One Gigabyte is equal to just over one million Kilobytes - so as you can imagine, computing traffic in this manner for a busy website can be cumbersome! In practice, hosting companies will usually use a variety of techniques, including scanning of log files, or coverting rate data (Mbps) to Gigabytes by way of a formula. The end result, while not entirely inaccurate, must often be considered an approximation.


If you are not yet thuroughly confused, there is one more topic to consider with regards to bandwidth: 95th Percentile Monitoring.

Read on!


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