Question about bandwidth and Internet speed

Quoted from Guest on Thursday, 23 October 2025

I often hear that the bigger the bandwidth, the faster the internet speed. But is this always true? What other factors might affect the actual speed we experience?

Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences!

The amount of data you can transfer per month and the amount of data you can transfer per second are not necessarily tied together.

Having a 'wider pipe' can allow you to transfer more per second, but you'll often be limited by the other end. For example it does you no good to have a 300 petabyte per second connection if the place you're trying to download from can only do 500 megabit.

A provider giving you a 500GB/month limit on transfer is not going to necessarily be slower than one offering 1,000gb/month. The 500/mo could be on a 10GBPS connection while the 1,000/mo could be on a 1 GBPS connection.

Hopefully this makes it clear for you.

A lot of people assume that bigger bandwidth always means faster hosting performance, but that’s not always the case. Bandwidth basically sets how much data your server can handle at once, but the actual speed your website visitors experience depends on a bunch of other factors too.

For example, the server’s hardware and CPU, how many websites are sharing the same server, and even the hosting provider’s network setup can make a big difference. I’ve seen sites on lower-bandwidth plans load faster than high-bandwidth ones simply because the server was better optimized or had fewer accounts sharing resources. Caching, CDN usage, and site optimization are also huge—sometimes those make more of an impact than raw bandwidth numbers.

So yeah, higher bandwidth is great for handling lots of traffic or big file transfers, but in web hosting, choosing a plan with good server performance and optimization often matters more than just the bandwidth figure.

Would love to hear if others have noticed similar experiences with hosting setups where bandwidth wasn’t the main speed factor!

Not really. Bandwidth usually refers to the total amount of data that can be transferred between your site and visitors over a period (often per month). Having more allocated bandwidth doesn’t necessarily mean your site will load faster, it just means you can serve more visitors or larger files before hitting limits.

Bandwidth is not widely used anymore. Because it can have several meanings.

Instead, there is Monthly Traffic, often just called Traffic, which has nothing to do with speed.

Whatever the name, 1 Gbps or other numbers are what you are looking for. 100 Mbps is slow, 1 Gbps is pretty fast, 10 Gbps is extremely fast. But it also depends how many other people you are simultaneously sharing that Internet connection with.

All that said, I've seen hosts that restrict speed on certain protocols. The most common "really slow" protocol seems to be host to host FTP. Which is a pet peeve of mine.

Higher bandwidth helps, but it’s not the only factor. Latency, peering, and overall network quality often matter more in real-world performance.

Bigger bandwidth helps with capacity, not speed. Real performance depends more on latency, server load, routing, and optimization than just raw transfer limits.

bigger bandwidth doesn't always guarantee faster internet because other factors like latency, network congestion, and your home network's hardware also significantly impact speed.

Quoted from Guest on Thursday, 23 October 2025

Bandwidth is not widely used anymore. Because it can have several meanings.

Instead, there is Monthly Traffic, often just called Traffic, which has nothing to do with speed.

Whatever the name, 1 Gbps or other numbers are what you are looking for. 100 Mbps is slow, 1 Gbps is pretty fast, 10 Gbps is extremely fast. But it also depends how many other people you are simultaneously sharing that Internet connection with.

All that said, I've seen hosts that restrict speed on certain protocols. The most common "really slow" protocol seems to be host to host FTP. Which is a pet peeve of mine.

Some of that might actually be the FTP software itself though as most will place files in a que as to not overload the server trying to download all the files at once. Most FTP software was built well before we had 10GBPS ports in the datacentres.
Most facilities have 10GBPS as a minimum now a days some even go up to 40GBPS which is pretty dam quick.

Also 100Mbps is fine for general web browsing and downloading files it would be slower for uploading things like video files though which are quite large.
But the other thing to consider is the location of your website host, if your in the US and your web server is in the UK your going to notice a difference in speed due to a thing called latency.
Where the server is slower to load sites due to it being further away. So pick a location that is close to your main users.

Bandwidth has been used to refer to both the "traffic over long period" and "speed per second", but mostly speed.

A market average VPS product now might give you 1TB of traffic (transfer) in a month, while keep your transfer speed under 1 Gbit per second (speed, or "bandwidth".)