help

[mrpaul]

hi i was wounder what bandwitch was and why i sould restict people of it i haev a 2.2 mb connected but wehn ppl connect to my site ther gona use that connec tion right? so dose bandwitch cost me?

[MonkeyNation]

Thay're going to use their bandwidth and yours.

Infact, it'll be using bandwidth of several computers.
Say you have a connection with 1mb/s upstream, and your client has a connection with 2mb/s downstream; they would recieve data from your server at 1mb/s. The same would occur if you had 2mb/s up and they had 1mb/s down.
Say you downloaded a 500kb (Kilobits, not kilobytes.) file, then the server would lose 500 kilobits if billed on upstream bandwidth, and the client would lose 500 kilobits if billed on downstream bandwidth.
The hard bit comes because most mesurments of connections are megabits, not megabytes; a 1 megabit connection could get data at a maximum of 125 kilobytes/second. Because there are 8 bits in a byte, and most computer systems (Inc. Windows.) use kilobytes to mesure file size, so although you have a 2 megabit connection, you won't be able to actually download a 2 megabyte file in a second.
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