OVERVIEW

Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves.

Anonymous

Connectivity is a buzzword used in Internet circles to refer to the ability of computers to link to networks, and therefore to the Internet. This chapter deals with the bandwidth aspect of connectivity, i.e., the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. Although this chapter does not provide a complete education on connectivity and bandwidth, it does provide the information you will need to make an intelligent connectivity decision.

The first step is to estimate the amount of bandwidth you will need to feed data from your web server to your customers.

Bandwidth (in the Internet context) is the number of bits per unit time that can be carried across a communications line. The basic unit of bandwidth measurement is bits per second (bps), but most commonly you ll see it expressed Kbps or Mbps, which stand for kilo-bits per second and mega-bits per second, respectively. The rate at which your connection transfers data is measured in the same bits per second. This bandwidth determines how fast data is transmitted to and from your web server and also how many requests can be serviced simultaneously. Even with a robust server, if you do not have sufficient bandwidth for the number of customers coming to your website, delays or failures will occur.

Select a way of delivering bandwidth that is scalable to meet your website s future needs while at the same...