One of the more difficult things to get your head around when it comes to choosing a web hosting service can be how much bandwidth you need. Even if you have owned several websites before and are by no means a novice when it comes to choosing a hosting company, it is easy to be dazed and confused by everything that a hosting company’s website can throw at you.
There are some certain factors when it comes to bandwidth:
- You need to find the right bandwidth option for you.
- If you don’t, you will find you have an underperforming website, face additional charges, or both.
What is Bandwidth?
In its most basic definition, bandwidth describes the level of traffic and data allowed to travel and transfer between your site, users, and the Internet.
Each web hosting company will offer a particular level of bandwidth. This is often a good indication of which hosting companies have the best networks, connections, and systems. Usually, the more bandwidth a web host can provide, the faster and the better those three factors will be. At the same time, you should try to avoid attractive looking ‘unlimited bandwidth’ offers, as these are often not all that they seem (more on this point later). Unmetered bandwidth should be more along the lines of what you are looking for.
Your Network Connectivity
You probably already know that the Internet is defined and created by the millions of computers around the world that connected by networks. The bigger the connection, the faster the network, and the more bandwidth that is available for a site.
If you are familiar with your home internet connection, you have probably encountered bandwidth at some stage. This was probably in terms of your connection speed. After all, speed is a lot easier to understand for the layperson than a technical sounding term such as bandwidth.
Bandwidth at Home
10 years ago, you might have used a frustratingly slow DSL connection, with a speed of 1.5MB per second. Replace the word speed with bandwidth, and you will understand easily. Your bandwidth allowed a maximum of 1.5MB per second to transfer from a network to your computer.
The reason broadband and fiber optic internet was invented and quickly became popular was because of how slow a DSL connection was.
Within Web Hosting
Source: Austinseoguy.com
To focus back to web hosting, you can liken a DSL connection to a shared server. On its own, the connection or server is very powerful; when being shared by dozens or hundreds of people, it slows down to a crawl.
You can still see this today if you go to an internet café or a library; the connection will be noticeably quicker if you go early in the morning and are the only person in there than if you go at peak times.
Bandwidth and the Relationship With Web Traffic
We are going to use another analogy to help make bandwidth clearer. In this example, the bandwidth is the number of tables in a restaurant, and the web traffic is diners. The simple math is this: the more tables there are in the restaurant, the more diners there are that can eat in there at any one time.
Translate this back to the Internet: the higher your bandwidth, the more people can visit your site and have an enjoyable experience. Remember, however, that it takes a very special restaurant with skilled employees to manage operations when the venue is full to capacity. How your site operates under the stress of high traffic will be crucial to your success. What is the use of high bandwidth if your site cannot cope? You might be able to facilitate 400 visitors a day. What would happen if they all turned up at once?
This is an important consideration to make when choosing a bandwidth option and it might require you to carry out some detailed research into your likely visitor demographics. The most likely outcome will be that you decide to pay for more bandwidth so that there is consistency in your website performance across the day for all visitors.
Considering Bandwidth and Web Design
Do not be one of the unfortunate people who falls into the trap of thinking that downloading something is only associated with YouTube or iTunes. Almost every act a person does online involves downloading something. The bigger and more complicated your web design, the more bandwidth you are going to use up whenever someone visits even your homepage.
Thankfully, modern web design trends are moving towards simplistic, minimalist designs. This means you can make your own site look like this without looking like you are merely trying to save yourself some additional money!
The Big Question: How Much Bandwidth Do You Need?
This answer to this question depends on a variety of factors. While that might seem like a cop-out, it is actually a very positive thing, because it means you can really start to nail down how much bandwidth you need specifically for your site. This is great for when you start searching for a hosting company and can immediately dismiss anyone who starts telling you to buy more just for the sake of it.
The Bandwidth Formula
If you are not offering any file downloads from your website, apply the following formula to discover how much bandwidth you need:
Daily visitors x Daily page views x Average page size x 31 x Tolerance number
If you will have downloadable content on your website, it gets a little more complicated, but is still a reasonably straightforward equation. If you do not remember your math from school, remember that you have to work out the brackets first!
(Daily visitors x Daily page views x Average page size) + (Daily file downloads x Average file size) x 31 x Tolerance number
Finding the Answer
So this makes sense to you, we have produced the following table that you can reproduce, or print and use yourself, which will help you come to the answer. We have also included example numbers that we will use to revisit the equation at the end.
| Element | What it Means | Number (Our Example, Populate this with Your own Numbers) |
| Daily visitors (average) | The number of daily visitors you expect your site to have. Calculate an average across the month. Do not over-complicate it and work it out day-by-day. | 200 |
| Daily page views (average) | Again, calculate an average projection across the month. | 650 |
| Average page size | What is the average size of your pages, all things included, in KB. | 60 |
| Daily file downloads (average) | How many times will content be downloaded from your site on a daily basis in terms of additional files independent of your web pages? | 10 |
| Average downloaded file size | How big is the average file you can download from your site? Err on the side of caution and always go bigger if in doubt. Measure this in KB, too. | 850 |
| Tolerance number | This is basically your ‘room for error.’ If ’1′ is your estimate, make this number 1.33, or 1.5, depending on how confident you are in your projections. If you believe your site may grow quickly, aim for a higher number. | 2 |
In case you are wondering; the 31 comes from the maximum number of days in a month. With most hosting companies, bandwidth allowance monthly, so we are taking the numbers and multiplying them by 31. Do not miscalculate and double check every number, otherwise you could find yourself with only a fraction of what you require, or paying more for bandwidth that you do not!
Remember, too, that most hosting companies will offer bandwidth based on GB per month, so remember to convert the number from KB to GB.
The Solution
This is what our hypothetic website would need:
(Daily visitors [200] x Daily page views [650] x Average page size [60]) + (Daily file downloads [10] x Average downloaded file [850]) x 31 x 2
Simplified, this gives us:
7,800,000 + 8500 x 31 x 2
The answer to which is a huge looking 484,127,800KB, which is around 462GB. For this website, the required bandwidth would be 462GB.
Choosing Your Solution
Bear in mind that a number such as that represents what you would see from a reasonably sized website turning over a good sum of money. A small business might only require up to 5GB, if that, when they first launch their website. It is also unlikely that when you first get started you will have a lot of content to download. However, this is still a great equation to keep in mind if you are looking to project costs for when your business grows and you are expecting to see significantly high traffic levels hitting your site.
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