If I am looking for hosting and the ad says 5GB bandwith, what exactly does that mean? Does it have something to do with how many visitors my site can get or how many clicks? Help, I'm clueless!!
Bandwidth is simply how much data is exchanged between your site and all your viewers. That includes all data, including graphics, text, HTML, etc. Each of these items has a size in kb. Let's say your web page contains 3 graphics which are 30kb each. your html is 12kb. your text is 2kb. When one user views your page, that has created 104kb in 'bandwidth'. So if 100 people view the site, you've used 10400kb in bandwidth, etc.
Think of bandwidth as a major highway with a toll booth. The toll booth collects $$ for every car that goes up the highway or down the highway. The more traffic there is in either direction, the more it costs them to maintain the highway, and the more $$ they collect to pay for it. It's the same thing with data flowing to and from the server.
Technically bandwidth is the carrying capacity of the channel, not the amount of data transfered. An analog voice line with a modem has a theortical capicity to transfer 56Kbps downstream. So that would be that bandwidth limit. You may use it all at any given time downloading, or you may just be reading your email and the line is idle. The bandwidth stays the same. The amount of data transfered is limited by the bandwidth and time, but not soley determined by it (the bandwidth).
What that means is the host probably does not know what bandwidth is, lol.
In this case they probably mean you are allowed 5GB of data transfer a month.
Technically, you're absolutely right... but the question was regarding "when a web host advertises you get 5GB of bandwidth, what does it mean?" In that sense of the word 'bandwidth', it's strictly the data flow.
However, Bandwidth has taken on significance as the industry accepted term for how much data transfer one is allowed. Most hosting plans use them both.
