Bandwidth - So, this seriously matters, but you shouldn't spend money on it. The biggest things about bandwidth, and connectivity are: reliability, latency, and capacity (in order of most important to least important)
Reliability:
This is things like, packet loss, how often your connectivity is impaired, etc... This will have the largest Ux impact. Most bandwidth providers will have a pretty good story about this. Typically, the delta of reliability between a $15/mo provider and a $150/mo provider doesn't actually provide any realistic differences. Don't waste your money.
Latency:
Although, most of the applications we'll be working on won't be sensitive to connectivity latency, it does create an upper bound of the speed of TCP data transfer. (Look at the big fat, long pipe problem). All of us have big fat, long pipes to our houses phones now. You can't do much for this than locate your datacenter well. The other thing i, you can ensure that your transit provider has good peering relationships, and transit. I would recommend looking at the list of peers through a looking glass (bgp.he.net is a particularly good looking one).
Capacity: This is the question of how much bandwidth can I soak up at any given point. You shouldn't ever have to think about this problem. You're probably not going to have to scale your bandwidth faster than what your upstream already has. Nonetheless, if you're running a bandwidth intensive site, you should consider this, because you could potentially choke your upstream. They will more than likely just go ahead and blackhole you in order to preserve the rest of their revenue stream.
Bandwidth - So, this seriously matters, but you shouldn't spend money on it. The biggest things about bandwidth, and connectivity are: reliability, latency, and capacity (in order of most important to least important)
Reliability: This is things like, packet loss, how often your connectivity is impaired, etc... This will have the largest Ux impact. Most bandwidth providers will have a pretty good story about this. Typically, the delta of reliability between a $15/mo provider and a $150/mo provider doesn't actually provide any realistic differences. Don't waste your money.
Latency: Although, most of the applications we'll be working on won't be sensitive to connectivity latency, it does create an upper bound of the speed of TCP data transfer. (Look at the big fat, long pipe problem). All of us have big fat, long pipes to our houses phones now. You can't do much for this than locate your datacenter well. The other thing i, you can ensure that your transit provider has good peering relationships, and transit. I would recommend looking at the list of peers through a looking glass (bgp.he.net is a particularly good looking one).
Capacity: This is the question of how much bandwidth can I soak up at any given point. You shouldn't ever have to think about this problem. You're probably not going to have to scale your bandwidth faster than what your upstream already has. Nonetheless, if you're running a bandwidth intensive site, you should consider this, because you could potentially choke your upstream. They will more than likely just go ahead and blackhole you in order to preserve the rest of their revenue stream.