Knowledgebase

You might have read our article about how much webspace is needed for hosting your webspace. This article talks about how much bandwidth or traffic is needed.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed between your web site and the rest of the internet. Bandwidth amount is determined by network connections, both internal to the data center and external to the internet. Most web hosting companies will measure bandwidth by the month and set the limits accordingly.

To make bandwidth and traffic more clear, just think of cars on a highway. The number of lanes is the bandwidth and the number of cars is the traffic. If there is one car on the highway, it can travel quickly but if there is a lot of traffic, cars will travel very slowly using up all of the lanes. The more bandwidth/lanes, the more traffic/cars can ride to and on your website.

Unlimited Bandwidth?

Some hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth, which is not even possible. There are always physical limitations to bandwidth as well as disk space. “Unlimited” is nothing but a marketing technique. Having “unlimited” bandwidth can even hurt you more if you have a large website with many visitors. “Unlimited” plans are ok if you have a small website, but then again, why would you need it? You don’t.

So how much do I need?

There really is no way to know for sure how much bandwidth you will need before your site gets up and running for a while.
If your site has been running for a while, the common bandwidth algorithm is as follows:

Avg. page views x Avg. page size x Avg. visitors (daily) x days in a month (30)

This calculation should tell you approximately how much bandwidth your site needs.

Bandwidth Hogs

Flash sites take up a ton of bandwidth as well as large video/audio files and file downloads.
So you can see there is no guaranteed way of finding out how much bandwidth you need, especially if your site has not been up for a while. My advice would be to use the bandwidth calculation. If your site hasn’t been up for a while or has not been built yet, I would recommend the following and all numbers are on the high side.

• Small basic site (minimal downloads/media/etc) – 1-4GB
• Medium sized site with lots of traffic – 10-40GB
• Large websites with lots of downloads/media/traffic – 40-100GB

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