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When you are buying insufficient bandwidth, you might find yourself in two undesired situations: paying, usually high fees, for the extra bandwidth your web site needed or having your web site shut off. Overbuying bandwidth is not a good thing either as it will put you in the position to pay for something you don’t use. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.
What is bandwidth anyway?
Let’s just see what bandwidth is. Bandwidth is the term that is used to denote the amount of data that has been transferred from your web space to the computers of your visitors. To put it simple, bandwidth is the amount of data that flows across a network wire in a given period of time. In web hosting industry this time period usually is one month. This happens simply because web hosting providers are also charged monthly for their huge broadband Internet connection. This is the cost that ultimately is then passed on to the consumer in the form price for their individual web hosting plan.
Bandwidth being such a delicate matter for a successful web presence, could you at least estimate the bandwidth needs of your web site? The answer is yes, you can estimate it, but you can never be sure of your estimate being perfectly correct because of all the variables involved.
How do I calculate my bandwidth?
If your home page is, say, 2 MB in size, every visitor who opens it (assuming they only open your home page and don’t browse the rest of your site) downloads 2 MB of data to their device. For 100 visitors, that’s a total of 200 MB of data transferred from the web server hosting your site to your visitors.
So a formula for computing your estimated needs of bandwidth would look like this: Size of your web content * number of visitors that accessed that web page = your consumed bandwidth
The formula looks very simple, yet estimating correctly the bandwidth required by your web site is anything but simple. This is obvious when you look at what makes up this formula.
The size of one web page is one thing, and the total size of your web site is another. You should take into consideration the total size of your web site and this means including files offered for download. Also web sites grow in time or even change completely. When this happens, you must redo the estimates for your web site bandwidth.
When it comes to visitors browsing your web site, it is rather difficult to predict what pages your visitors will access. For example, some visitors would stop at the index page, other will look for the contact details, and some will download your brochure. Knowing the sheer number of visitors your site has over one month can be very helpful in estimating the bandwidth required to support them.
Ultimately, when trying to find out the amount of bandwidth your web site requires you must answer two important questions:
What is the size of your website, and how much traffic will it get? A small website that doesn’t offer audio or video downloads and doesn’t get much traffic doesn’t need much bandwidth; a few gigabytes a month is usually plenty. But if your site generates a lot of traffic, choose a hosting plan that offers plenty of bandwidth. Many hosts now offer unmetered bandwidth on their shared plans.
For your reference, an average web site (for example a personal or a family web site) will also get average traffic, meaning a range of 50-500 visitors per day.
When assessing your website’s bandwidth needs, also check the host’s other limits. Even plans with unlimited or unmetered bandwidth usually limit resources such as processing power, so a sudden traffic spike can slow your site down or get it paused temporarily.
How to keep your bandwidth down?
Rich content such as images, videos and audio files makes your website more attractive to visitors, but it is also the quickest way to use up your bandwidth. This article won’t tell you to give up using such files, but simply point out that overcrowding your pages with images can harm not only your bandwidth, but also your website’s speed and usability. Good website design is not measured by the number of images per page.
Offering downloads on your website, such as music, PDF or video files, is another thing that can use up your bandwidth with just a handful of visitors. A PDF file half a megabyte in size will use 1 GB of bandwidth a month if just 2,000 people download it.
Stick to your goals and adjust your web site’s content strictly to fulfill them.
Keeping down the amount of bandwidth your web site is consuming might be easy to achieve with good preparation and excellent web design.
To avoid sky-high bandwidth costs, try to apply the following suggestions
1) Make your web pages as small as possible. Many free tools can compress your files, and most hosts can turn on compression for you.
2) Keep the images on your website to a sensible number, and compress the ones you use. Modern formats such as WebP keep quality high at a much smaller file size.
3) Try not to offer too many large downloadable files. If you have to offer them, keep them as small as you can, or host large videos on a service such as YouTube.
The right way to start planning your website’s bandwidth needs, apart from the traffic your site will get, is to look at the type of content you are going to serve your visitors. If your website is packed with video or music, or offers lots of large downloads, consider a VPS or dedicated server, or a content delivery network (CDN). Even if your website is just starting out and you have a limited budget, it’s wise to choose a hosting plan that gives you more resources than you estimate you need, at a reasonable price.
No matter how good your estimate is, it may turn out to be wrong, so don’t forget to check what your host charges, or does, if you go over your plan’s limits.