What is Bandwidth in Hosting and How Can You Calculate Your Hosting Bandwidth Needs?
It is crucial to assess your business requirements first before investing in web hosting. You need to ensure that your hosting provider’s plan meets your short-term and long-term business needs, and if the price falls within your budget. However, before you get to the product and price, you must evaluate your hosting bandwidth.
For better clarity, let’s understand what bandwidth in hosting is.
What is bandwidth in hosting?
Bandwidth in hosting is the amount of data that your website can transmit to the visitors or users in each period of time. Bandwidth is calculated and sold by gigabytes, but a few hosting companies offer unmetered or unlimited bandwidth.
When you avail of the larger bandwidth, you can provide spunky, aesthetically pleasing content or features to your users.
To understand how bandwidth works, think of a traffic. When the road lanes are narrow and few, vehicles are stuck in traffic for minutes, even hours. But when the road lanes are wide and plenty, more vehicles can get through. Think of the road lanes as bandwidth and the cars as the website data. More data can flow through if there is a bigger space.
In simpler terms, the bigger the bandwidth, the quicker the content will be delivered to your users, especially during high traffic times. This is paramount to growing your audience as well as increasing your sales.
A large bandwidth becomes crucial when a website has a sudden surge in traffic. If your bandwidth cannot accommodate the surge, it will crash or fail. This crash will halt your operations and affect your sales. Therefore, you need to anticipate the possible surges and check the bandwidth that your hosting provider offers.
How to calculate your hosting bandwidth needs
Calculating bandwidth is essential, but for beginners with a small audience, they don’t need to do this. However, when their website grows and attracts more visitors, that’s the time that they need to upgrade their current bandwidth to accommodate the increased number of visitors. This is also the time that they must calculate their bandwidth.
Here are important parameters that you’d need to calculate your bandwidth:
Monthly Visitors – Check the number of monthly visitors your website receives. You should be able to find this information using web analytics.
Page Views – Check the number of pages your visitors open on an average when they visit your website. You can find this information using web analytics.
Webpage Size – Check the size of your webpages. You can use online tools like Pingdom or GTMetrix to determine their sizes.
Average Daily Visitors – The total number of monthly visitors divided by 30.
Average Page Views – The average page viewed by a visitor.
Average File Size – The total file size divided by the number of files.
Average Page Size – The average size of your webpage.
With the parameters listed above, you can now calculate your bandwidth requirement easily with one simple equation:
[(Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors) + (Average Download per day x Average File Size)] x30 (Number of days in a month) x Redundant Factor
Redundant factor – The recommended value is 2. This is for allowance in case of unforeseen circumstances.
If you are confused or unsure of your computation, you can use this bandwidth calculator.
Ideally, you should go for a hosting plan that offers more bandwidth than your current bandwidth usage. This will give you more capacity to add content to your website as well as the ability to handle a surge in traffic as you run seasonal promotions or as your audience grows.
How to check the bandwidth usage of a website
Many web hosting providers include a section where you can view the amount of bandwidth that you used over a certain period. Use this information to ensure that you don’t exceed your bandwidth limit. And if you are using cPanel (a web hosting control panel), you’ll be able to find your bandwidth information on your dashboard under Monthly Bandwidth Transfer.
But what happens if you exceed your bandwidth limit? Let’s find out.
What happens to your website if you exceed your bandwidth limit?
When you exceed your hosting bandwidth limit, it results in Error 509, which is one of the most common errors. You might have encountered this before.
Any of the following things may happen when you exceed the limit of your bandwidth:
- The web host may suspend your website and notify you that your website has exceeded the bandwidth limit. You have the option to upgrade your plan, or your website will remain suspended for a certain period.
- The web host may charge extra fees (through fines or over-usage fees).
- The web host may automatically upgrade your current hosting plan to a bigger plan to provide you with extra bandwidth.
So, it is highly recommended to check the policy of the host provider to understand the implications of exceeding the hosting bandwidth. You can even choose the hosting providers that offer unmetered bandwidth at a reasonable price to keep the issues like exceeding the bandwidth at bay.
Purchase a reliable web hosting plan today!
Your website should be running smoothly as it provides content to your users or visitors. They visit your website in hopes that you could solve their problems. Therefore, you should provide a positive user experience to make sure that their browsing is flawless and uninterrupted. Their positive feedback is what keeps them coming back and their purchases are what generate sales for you. To ensure that their experience is worthwhile, turn to a reliable web hosting provider.
BigRock offers different types of web hosting plans with unlimited space, bandwidth, and emails at a reasonably affordable price. Moreover, our web hosting offers 99.99% uptime and is fully equipped with cPanel (Demo) / Plesk (Demo) Control with 30-day money-back guarantee, providing you with best-in-class web hosting services. Get started now by getting in touch with our representatives.
