What is Bandwidth?

Most hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So exactly what is bandwidth as it relates to web hosting? Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between the web site and the rest of the Internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public Internet. A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If one is the only car on a highway, one can travel very quickly. If one is stuck in the middle of rush hour, one may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough?

It depends. Since bandwidth is a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, one should take time to determine just how much is right. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so one needs to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by the site on a monthly basis

If one does not intend to provide file download capability from the site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward:

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor

If one intends to allow people to download files from one's site, the bandwidth calculation should be:

[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) +
(Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Each item in the formula is as follows:

Average Daily Visitors - The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could be from 1 to 1,000,000.

Average Page Views - On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view. If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of those pages each time they visit.

Average Page Size - The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate this directly.

Average Daily File Downloads - The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average, each day.

Average File Size - Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site. Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can calculate this directly.

Fudge Factor - A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that your estimate is off by 50%. However, if you were very unsure, you could use 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements are more than met.

Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why the formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

Most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. If one has a web site that is composed of static web pages and one expects little traffic to the site on a daily basis, low bandwidth plan should be opted. If one goes over the amount of bandwidth allocated in the plan, the hosting company could charge over usage fees, so if one thinks the traffic to the site will be significant, one may want to go through the calculations above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.

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