How much Bandwidth is required when choosing a Web Host
One of the first steps you should take before choosing a Web Host is to determine the amount of bandwidth required for your web site.
First of all, what exactly is bandwidth? In computing terms, bandwidth is often used as a synonym for data transfer rate - the amount of data transferred across a network at any given time, ie. from one computer to another.
The size of a web site depends entirely on the contents within it. Generally speaking, text contents use the least amount of space which is then followed by images, or graphical content, and then the multimedia content. A web site which consists purely of text will be considerably smaller than another site with text and images. In context, a web site with text, images and video content will be a lot bigger than those mentioned before and will therefore require more bandwidth to be hosted without running into any problems.
So how does one determine a sufficient amount of bandwidth to host their site? This can be done by assessing your web site to calculate the average bandwidth required.
First, you'll want to estimate the approximate number of users that may access your site in a month and secondly, count the number of pages that the user may access. Now estimate the average size of an HTML file and the total size of the images and/or multimedia in one page.
The following formula can be used to estimate the required amount of bandwidth;
- Bandwidth needed = Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors x Number of days in a month (30) x Redundant Factor
- Average Daily Visitors: The total number of monthly visitors/30.
- Average Page Size: The average size of your web page.
- Average Page Views: The average page viewed per visitors.
- Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranging from 1.3 – 1.8.
After working out the numbers above, you should come to a rough estimation to the bandwidth required for your web site.
After getting the approximate value for the bandwidth, you can then approach a Web Hosting provider that offers sufficient bandwidth packages for your site. With this in mind, you have to consider a few other aspects when accepting the services they provide. Possibly the most important of them all is upgradability. Should your web site become increasingly popular in the future, you'll want to make sure that you're in a position to host the site from the same server without any additional investment and to be on the safer side, try choosing a hosting provider who offers flexible packages.
