How Much Hosting Bandwidth Does My Website Needs

How Much Hosting Bandwidth Does My Website Need?

VPS / By / September 28, 2022 / 6 minutes of reading

When choosing a hosting plan for your businesses or projects, you will see each plan comes with a bunch of server configurations. Specifically, the configurations include CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth. The value of those usually grows higher as the hosting plans go more advanced. For example, the CPU core in a lower-level plan is 2, and it can go up to 24 in an advanced plan. This also applies to other configurations. Then, how many of those configurations would your projects need? Does the plan that fulfils your needs fit your budget? Here we are going to look at the hosting bandwidth. To help you understand it better, this article will cover the following topics:

  1. What is hosting bandwidth?
  2. why does hosting bandwidth matter?
  3. How can you calculate your hosting bandwidth needs?
  4. Selecting a hosting plan with the right bandwidth

What is hosting bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the speed of the data transfer to and from a web server. To put it simply, bandwidth is the amount of data that a server can transfer in a certain amount of time. Data can be the content of your website or files that are for download. It is often measured in megabits, megabytes, and so on. And time is measured in seconds. Bandwidth stands as the upper limit for the rate at which data can transfer between your servers and that of your website visitors. So, 100Mbps means that up to 100 megabits of information can be transferred over the server in a single second.

 

The easiest way to understand how bandwidth works is to think of it as a highway road.

 

Obviously, a multi-lane road can allow more cars to pass at a time than a single-lane road. In the same way, a higher bandwidth can deliver more data at a time than a lower bandwidth.

 

Sometimes, you will see traffic instead of bandwidth. Traffic measures how much data is transferred through a host over a given period of time. The period of time for charges is typically one month. For instance, 10 terabytes per month.

How does hosting bandwidth matter?

When visitors access your website, the content data is delivered to them. The larger your website content is(if you have lots of large-size content, such as videos and pictures), the higher bandwidth it requires. Or the more visitors requiring site access at the same time, the higher bandwidth you need to ensure the same content delivery rate. That is to say, the amount of bandwidth determines how fast your website can deliver content to your visitors during peak traffic times. This makes it critical to ensure a great user experience, which helps with growing site visitors and thus increasing sales.

 

Therefore, having high bandwidth allows you to have more content and more visitors. vice versa, lower bandwidth may slow down your website content delivery and cause unpleasant user experiences.

 

Here are two important reasons why you should have plenty of bandwidth in your hosting plan:

  • Your website has more media elements: Media elements, like pictures, videos, and animations, are naturally larger than plain text. If your website include more non-text elements, you will need higher bandwidth.
  • Your visitors can view more pages of your website: If your website is frequently adding new pages, like blog posts and product pages, then the average page views will be higher.

How can you estimate bandwidth needs?

Based on what we talked about above, we will consider the following parameters to decide how much bandwidth your project needs.

  1. Monthly Visitors: Check how many monthly visitors your website receives. You can find the numbers on Google Analytics if you have integrated the tool into your website.
  2. Webpage Size: This is the size of the content that each visitor will be sent each time they access your site. If your site contains a lot of media elements, such as videos, pictures, and animations, the webpage size will be large. You can use a tool online like GTMetrix or Pingdom to determine the size of your website’s web pages.
  3. Download file size: You should also calculate files for downloading if you have any.
  4. Pageviews: the average number of page views per visitor.
  5. Redundancy: Ideally, you should choose a hosting plan that offers more bandwidth than your current usage. This will give you the ability to handle traffic surges. We’d suggest you have twice the bandwidth of your current usage.

 

Let’s say your site receives 1000 visitors a month, with every visitor opening 5 pages and each page is 5MB. Meantime, the website is offering a file for downloading. The monthly file downloading times are 900 and the file size is 10M. Then you can roughly calculate your traffic as follows:

(monthly visitors * page views * page size +monthly downloading * file size) * redundancy

[1000 * 5 * 10 + 900 * 10]*2 = 118000MB/month=118G/month

 

When you first start your website and have no visitors, you probably don’t have to calculate your bandwidth. A primitive plan would just be enough. However, as your webpage size and visitors grow, you are gonna need more.

Selecting a hosting plan with the right bandwidth

Since you already know your hosting bandwidth requirements, now you can start selecting a hosting plan that meets your needs.

There are three main types of bandwidth offerings: metered bandwidth, unlimited bandwidth, and unmetered bandwidth.

Metered bandwidth: in a metered bandwidth plan, hosting providers monitor the bandwidth you use and the total bandwidth usage has a strict cap. When you exceed that capped amount, either your website will stop working or you will be charged extra for the additional data you use. Therefore, a metered bandwidth plan may not be good if your website is content-rich or gets heavy traffic.

Unlimited Bandwidth: Unlimited bandwidth is actually not unlimited. It’s just that a metered bandwidth plan sets a higher ceiling for the amount of data you can transfer. And your website probably won’t reach that limit. However, the speed is always limited.

Unmetered Bandwidth: as the name indicates, the bandwidth usage is not monitored and has no restriction. You can use as much as bandwidth you like. Just like the unlimited bandwidth plan, the unmetered bandwidth plan has a speed limit. However, you will never have to pay for the extra data you use because there is no cap on how much data you transfer. If your website is going to grow large or expects to see a traffic surge, the unmetered bandwidth is a perfect fit.

At DatabaseMart, we provide unmetered bandwidth for all our hosting plans, including VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, and shared hosting. No matter what stage your website is at, you can rest assured that DBM will not charge you for overusing the bandwidth.

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