Web Hosting Bandwidth

What is bandwidth usage? What does bandwidth mean? How much bandwidth do you need? How can you reduce bandwidth usage?

When choosing a web hosting company, the amount of bandwidth you purchase can be crucial to the success of your website. When it comes to website hosting, bandwidth mainly refers to data transfer. The connection to your server is important as well. Files that are loaded to or from servers uses internet bandwidth to push files along the network at various speeds. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting provider, surf the web or use an audio application, you are using bandwidth. Generally speaking, the more bandwidth you have, the more traffic your site will be able to handle at one time.

Web hosting providers can put a limitation on bandwidth at certain times during peak periods or charge you a flat fee per month for bandwidth usage. If you go over the flat fee, then they charge you extra for using extra bandwidth.

Roughly estimating, 2GB of bandwidth should be perfect for a very small personal site. If you're going to running a medium site with text and images but no large files, 20GB would be ideal. Larger sites on the other hand, require 50GB of bandwidth. Good hosting company's will send you an email if you're about to run out of bandwidth, letting you know that your site may go offline if you exceed the quota. This way, you can upgrade your plan if you choose to do so.

To determine how much bandwidth you currently use, take a look at your traffic history. If you don't have a site yet and you want to get one, you can estimate how much bandwidth you use by estimating the following factors: Daily number of visitors, or the number you expect, daily average of page views per visitor, or the number you expect, and size of your site, including graphics, or the size you expect it to be.

Then, take each of those numbers and multiply them by 30, and then add them together. This gives you a rough average size of your monthly transfer needs. If you're also going to offer downloads, then take the number of expected downloads per day, multiply times 30, and add that to the above transfer total.

If your web site is huge, providing audio/video downloads, as well as being very popular then you would certainly require a huge amount of bandwidth. Let’s say you have a video file that is 150 MB in size and in a single day a 100 visitors download the file. This means that 15 GB of bandwidth will have been used. If you multiply that by 30 days for the month it comes to 450 GB.

How can you reduce bandwidth usage? The easy way is to reduce the size of the files on your site is to optimize graphics, and build cascading style sheets, call JavaScript externally if you use it instead of embedding it yourself, and don't use streaming audio or video. You can also clean up the HTML in your page by reducing the amount of META tags, white space, and comments.