The importance of Bandwidth when choosing Web Hosting

Oct 19
07:34

2011

Joe Caws

Joe Caws

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Understanding the important of bandwidth, or data transfer, when choosing a web host can be critical to the performance and ongoing availability of your website. We look at a rough guide on finding out how much bandwidth you might need for your website.

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The amount of data that is sent from one computer to another is known as either data transfer or bandwidth. For the website to display properly to a visitor,The importance of Bandwidth when choosing Web Hosting Articles all the files needed to display the page must be transferred to the visitors browser. The total bandwidth required for this transfer to happen can be determined by adding up the sizes of the components that make up the web page, including any video and sound files, images files, page code and text.

When choosing a web hosting company, understanding how much bandwidth you are likely to use is critical in ensuring you have the best web hosting package for your needs. If you don't have enough, your web site might end up being suspended for exceeding your allowance. When in doubt always go for more than you think you might need, but how can you work out how much is going to be about right?

This will be pretty easy to accomplish when your website is a basic one comprised of just html and images. By looking at the sizes of the html page and image files that make up a web page you can get an idea of the bandwidth requirement for that page. A rough idea is to start with your website's home page since this will often be the busiest page of your website.

Once you have a figure for your homepage its a fairly simply task of multiplying it by the number of expected daily visitors, an average number of pageviews and then number of days in a month.

In the first few months after the launch of a new website, its quite common for a website to attract just a hundred or so visitors a day.   For a well established website this could be thousands of visitors a day, but you will have a much better idea of your daily average if you have been running a website for sometime by simply checking your analytics or webstats.

Example

Lets say your homepage is made up of html and images that total 250kb. Your visitors may visit an average of 3 pages per day and you reckon you will get 250 visitors every day. A rough calculation for your monthly bandwidth could go like this:-

250Kb x 3 pages x 250 daily visitors x 30 days = 5,625,000Kb monthly expected bandwidth

Dividing the resulting figure by 1024 will give you a total in Megabytes = 5,493Mb or roughly 5.5Gb.

Of course, this is a very simplistic guide and the average page views and sizes of pages will depend very much on the exact content of your website and its subject matter.

The above could be a typical example for a blog website for example where you want to find the right bandwidth for your blog web hosting requirement. By choosing a web hosting package that gives you more than this amount will help to make sure your website can cater for your expected number of visitors.