When picking the right hosting plan for your website, you’ll need to keep an eye on how much bandwidth your web host will provide.
Why? Well, if your hosting plan provides too little bandwidth, your website is likely to slow down significantly under high-traffic. On the other hand, too much bandwidth will have you paying unnecessary additional charges to your hosting provider.
So, for efficiency’s sake, you’ll want to get a bandwidth amount that’s appropriate for your website’s needs.
In this post, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about hosting bandwidth. We’ll talk about what bandwidth is, Why it’s important, how to calculate the amount of bandwidth your site needs, and how to see how much bandwidth your web host is offering.
Let’s begin!
While looking for the best web host for yourself, you might have noticed that each plan comes with a specific amount of bandwidth you can use.
But what is bandwidth anyway, and why should you care?
Well, bandwidth is the amount of your site’s data that can be transferred from its servers to users at a given time, so it’s actually a super-important consideration you need to make when picking a hosting plan.
For instance, if a webpage on your website has a size of 3 MB and 6 users visit the page at the same time, you’d need a bandwidth of 18 MB to accommodate that kind of traffic. But if, for example, your bandwidth is limited to 15 MB, you wouldn’t be able to accommodate the six users, which could lead to problems for you.
Hopefully, that’s enough to clear up your understanding of bandwidth. But if you’re still a bit bewildered, I find it helpful to think of bandwidth as the width of a road. The wider the road, the more the number of cars can be on the road at the same time.
That being said, if too many cars use a narrow road at the same time, there will be a traffic jam, and none of the cars will be able to move ahead.
The concept is not too difficult to understand, but people commonly confuse it with Data transfer.
To save you from making the same rookie mistake and using one term in place of the other, the difference between data transfer and bandwidth is simply this:
In the road analogy, bandwidth would refer to the number of cars that could pass at a given moment while data transfer would be the equivalent of the actual number of cars that did pass at a given moment.
Now – let’s discuss how you can calculate the exact amount of bandwidth (in concrete figures) you should get for your website.
Turns out, the process of calculating your bandwidth needs is pretty simple! You can calculate the figure using the mathematical formula below:
What do each of these factors mean? And how do they tell us the amount of bandwidth our website needs?
Well, let’s have a look.
First, recall that bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred from a server to the end-user at a time. This means that by choosing our bandwidth size, we’re trying to set a limit to how many people our website can adequately serve at a time.
Ideally, we’d want this figure to be high enough to cater to the usual amount of traffic coming to our website, as well as any unanticipated traffic spikes that may arise.
At the same time, though, we want to make sure that our bandwidth isn’t set so high that we never use it anywhere near capacity, and end up paying a lot of unnecessary additional fees for subscribing to a higher bandwidth package.
So, we look at these four factors:
So, a website with an average page size of 3 MB, and 10,000 monthly visitors (who each visit 3 pages at once on average) will have the following bandwidth requirement:
Once you’ve calculated how much bandwidth your website needs, the next question you’ll want to ask yourself is how much bandwidth your web host is currently offering you (and how much it can offer you at most).
Well, different web hosts come with various bandwidth options and you can find out what options they have for you on their websites or in the descriptions of their hosting plans.
If your bandwidth needs are different from what’s specified in a plan, you could even get in touch with a representative of your chosen web host and ask what they can do to accommodate you.
Another thing you should be mindful of is the kind of hosting you’ve opted for with your hosting provider. If your website is on shared hosting, it will share a single server with other websites, meaning it will be sharing the bandwidth as well.
So, if your website is very large, you may want to consider looking into VPS or cloud hosting, for example.
Most web hosts that offer unlimited or unmetered bandwidth (i.e., Bluehost) also impose a transfer speed limit on you, which ultimately ends up limiting the amount of bandwidth you can use per month.
Much like how restaurants need to match their ability to serve food to the number of people dining in at the same time, you, as a site owner, need to match your site’s ability to serve content to the people visiting your website at the same time.
This is what bandwidth is all about, and now that you’re up to speed, you can now go ahead and upgrade your website!
Daren Low is the founder of Bitcatcha.com. With over a decade’s experience in website development and internet marketing, Daren is a top authority on anything to do with building and managing an online business. Pick his brain today by connecting via Linkedin and Twitter.
