Your Bandwidth Needs

By Kristian

Whenever you search for a web host, one of the numbers you will pay close attention to is the amount of bandwidth included with each hosting package. You do not want to select a plan with too little bandwidth for your website. On the other hand, you do not want to pay for an abundance of bandwidth that you do not need and will never use.

Hosting packages will list the amount of monthly bandwidth included with the hosting plan. The amount of bandwidth will essentially tell you how much data can pass through the network during the month. You will often see hosting packages that list monthly data transfer instead of bandwidth. This will tell you how much data can be transferred from point A to point B in a given amount of time.

The more bandwidth you have with a hosting package, the more website traffic your website is able to receive and handle each month. For personal and hobby websites it may not always be necessary to pay for a lot of bandwidth. Unless your website receives high volumes of traffic, you can purchase a hosting plan with a lower amount of bandwidth. However, for many business websites and large organization websites, bandwidth does become very important.

As a business, you want your website to have high volume of traffic each and every month. You will want your website to be able to handle a great number of visitors to the website each day. Bandwidth becomes very important because you will want to have enough bandwidth to handle all the visitors to your website. In addition, you may also want additional bandwidth. This will give you some leeway on months when your website has even more traffic than usual. Having some extra bandwidth will help you to avoid having to pay overage fees in any given month.

Take the time to estimate how much bandwidth you will need before you start shopping for hosting. You will first need to consider how many visitors your website receives each day (for existing sites) or how many visitors you expect your website to receive on a daily basis. Then, consider the size of each page on your website. This includes the data on the page as well as the size of all the graphics found on that page. Consider the number of pages on your website that you expect each visitor to view on average. For example, you may estimate that you will receive 100 visitors a day and that each visitor will view about three pages of your website.

After considering the above questions, you can use a formula to come up with a ball park figure of how much bandwidth you will need. Multiply your estimated number of visitors X page size X expected number of views X 30 days. This will provide you with an estimate of the amount of bandwidth you will need for your website each month. Some websites also offer downloads. If this is the case, you must include downloads in your equation. Take the number of anticipated downloads X file size X 30 days and add that figure to your results from the equation above.

When estimating bandwidth add a little extra to the amount you come up with in order to take into consideration bandwidth used for email and your own uploads. Keep in mind you may also have underestimated some of your numbers and so it will be helpful to search for a web hosting plan with a little more bandwidth than you estimated.

Have a rough estimate of the amount of bandwidth you need will be helpful. You can use this figure as a general guideline. It will help to prevent you form buying a hosting package with way too little or way too much bandwidth.

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