How Much Bandwidth is Required For Your Web Hosting?

By Teddy Low

How much bandwidth do you need?

When it comes to web hosting shopping, bandwidth is often a major concern for most web owners. Seeing such, web hosting companies are offering larger and larger bandwidth quota nowadays to attract customer's eyeballs.

How much bandwidth do we need?

However, is huge bandwidth capacity that important? Just how much bandwidth is sufficient?

Well there is no one-answer-fit-all for the question. How much bandwidth you need depends on the amount of traffics your website is getting. Nevertheless, it's not difficult to estimate the amount of bandwidth needed and I will show you how in this article.

Estimating monthly bandwidth usage for your website

It's pretty tough to be 100% accuracy but here's a simple formula that will help you to roughly estimate the required bandwidth amount.

For website that does not offer file download capability:

Bandwidth (per day) = Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors

For website that offers file download capability:

Bandwidth (per day) = (Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors) + (Average File Downloads x Average File Sizes)

Take out the answer calculated and times it with number of days in a month (30) - that will be your website usage on bandwidth.

For example that your website serve just one static HTML page with a size of 100KB and you get 2 page views from 100 visitors per month. The website's monthly bandwidth usage will be 100 x 2 x 100 x 30 = roughly 600MB.

Margin of safety

Of course it's unreasonable for us to get just we needed without placing a margin of safety. To be safe and to avoid web server failure due to sudden surge in web traffics, a safety margin of 30 - 50% is indeed necessary. Back to our example above, it would be rational for the particular web owner to get 600 x 1.5 = 900MB bandwidth limit.

A final words for those who are getting started - getting an affordable but yet reliable web host is always the most important thing when starting of a new website. I would recommend Bluehost for those who are looking for a shared web host as they are on promotion at the moment. My advice to you is to take advantage on this and save some quick bucks for your hosting costs. But hey, that's my personal findings based on my own preference - in case you are doubtful, why not read further on Blue Host features review? Article written by Teddy Low