One of the major thing to consider if you are going to host your website is determining how much bandwidth your hosted website actually requires. Every web hosting company presents different hosting plan. In comparing those hosting plan, disk space and bandwidth becomes the major part to be taken into account. Further, disk space can be freed by arranging the content and by deleting the content if required, however, bandwidth requires some calculation and flexibility. Paying for more than required is senseless, however not having enough will dismiss clients when the site goes down or punish for going over the sum acquired. Therefore, how much of the server bandwidth your website actually require? If you invest your little time for subtle calculation to figure it out, you can ensure balancing of both the budget and bandwidth.
Once, website owner understands how much of the bandwidth his website actually requires, he can opt the best hosting platform without making expense of additional penny. Also, we often get an offer of unlimited bandwidth hosting platform from several hosting provider company. Are they actually providing what they’ve promised to? Nothing in life comes for free. Let’s understand it in more detail! Every hosting solutions has its own limitation of bearing web traffic. If the traffic exceeds the bandwidth space limitations, then it definitely causes technical issues such as site goes down and visitors might get distracted and go with the competitor sites to fulfill the requirements. So, before you decide to sign up for any hosting plans with unlimited bandwidth, make sure you are aware of all the consequences it brings about and you are making the wise decisions to opt the service from the particular Web Hosting Company.
What is Bandwidth Space?
Bandwidth is the quantification of the amount of data transferred and traffic that occurs in between the website and the end users via internet. The bandwidth space depends on the requirement of the individual or business how many pages it contains and estimated number of visitors to the site.
To understand it in more simpler way, whenever visitors visit to your site, their devices (mobile or PC) must actually download the files which construct the web page from the server before it gets displayed in the screen. The downloaded files size could be anything from texts, images, documents depending on the how much bandwidth is used up at that time. Besides this, bandwidth is also used when you backup your website or when someone downloads a file from the server from where your website is hosting. Also, in case if you deliver large files email to the multiple people, this transfer gets counted for bandwidth usage from the server.
When it comes to bandwidth, it is wise to keep in mind the ability of a web host to accommodate your needs if they grow more than expected. Some companies may charge a fee to transfer to another plan, charge an extravagant amount of money per certain amount of transfer beyond the plan, or even suspend the account once the maximum has been reached. Some Web Hosting, on the other hand, lets you upgrade and downgrade your plan at any time for no extra charge.
For the website owners, it is preferable to opt for a web hosting plan with a bit higher bandwidth as it ensures better speed, better connectivity and communications.
Estimated Bandwidth Calculation Procedure
Calculation of the bandwidth when launching the new website is sort of a hit or miss. The best way to determine is to track the site’s activity in monthly basis for first some couple of months after your website goes live so that the actual site’s monthly usage can be viewed. Also, in case of a bit more established website, the calculation for the estimated bandwidth is more convenient. To determine this:
- Firstly, estimate the site’s average page size in KB(kilobytes). In case, it is unknown a load time test on a few pages can provide the information to determine the average.
- The obtained value should then be multiplied by the monthly average number of visitors.
- Lastly, the obtained data from second step should again be multiplied by the average number of page views per visitor.
Remember that these calculations should be inclusive of every site hosted on the server. For instance, if on the same account, number of domains are running, then at that case you need to add up the page’s size, the visitors, and the page views. This provides a pretty accurate estimation of the bandwidth space that the website requires. All you need is a simple mathematics calculation. As these numbers don’t give the whole picture so we need to consider other factors as well but it helps you to greater extent ensuring precise estimation.
It is a good idea to recognize the ability of a web host to accommodate the requirement of the site owner if in case site visitors grow more than expected. Some companies take charge to transfer to next plan, also charge some amount of fee beyond the plan, or even suspend the account if it exceeds upper limit. Others do not charge any extra fee for the upgrade and downgrade the plan at time as per the requirement.
Role of Bandwidth Space in the Website
So how does the bandwidth affect the web hosting selection? Not much – especially if you’re in the starting phase of hosting your website. Bandwidth space also allows amount of the information stored on the server to be transferred sufficiently to the web visitors to other locations on the internet. Thus, in comparison to that of Storage space it is always available in greater extent ensuring faster loading of the website. The lesser the bandwidth space your hosting plan possess, the more time it takes to load your site no matter which type of network is used by the web traffic. It makes your website visiting visitors to wait for some time to load it if you have not sufficient bandwidth space in your hosting plan. Also, with this insufficient bandwidth space, it is likely that your website might be unavailable to the visitors as you have reached maximum data transfer limit. Below some statics data is presented to provide you general overview regarding the web traffic or Bandwidth Space.
- Statistically, 25GB of web traffic(Bandwidth) will support approximately 1,000,000 page views per month, which is enough for most websites.
- An average email that is sent is around 59 kB(kilobytes), which means per MB 16 emails. It means you could deliver approx. 400,000 emails per month with this plan, which no one generally does, before they reach the maximum limit.
What happens if you purchased hosting plan with a bit more bandwidth space than required
It is always beneficial for you to host your website with a bit more bandwidth space. It is likely that you might be wondering how purchasing hosting plan with more web traffic than is actually required might be beneficial. Probably not in cost. But there is possibility of excess web traffic to visit your website which might slow down your site as because of low bandwidth space and to avoid this issues leaving some room to grow might be considered beneficial for you. If I have to recommend you, I would say you must possess at least 50% additional space to resolve uncertain number of traffic spikes to your site. In case if your website does not possess large media files and does not involve online streaming too, then a hosting plan with web traffic 10GB per month might be enough for you. On the contrast, if you are doing online streaming of the videos and number of users are also heavy, also in case if your downloading and uploading the files on the website, you need to go with the more bandwidth space plan for your website to run smoothly without any interruption.
In this post, you have learned all you need to understand about the bandwidth space. The more bandwidth space is especially required when the number of visitors to your website is high and you want your website to run without any downtime issues ensuring user to feel better experience. Also, the formula above mentioned help you to determine the rough estimation as the precise estimation for the bandwidth space requirement depends on several other factors such as traffic spikes, pages layout, upload and download from your website etc. Thus, purchasing extra bandwidth (and lots of it), you’re not just future-proofing your web hosting, but also buying the peace of mind that comes from knowing you’ll be prepared for whatever comes your way.