How to Accurately Estimate Your Hosting Bandwidth Usage
When you are starting a new website, it can be easy to overlook the importance of bandwidth and hosting. As a business owner, one of the most important things you should know about your website is how much bandwidth it requires.
Bandwidth is a term that most people have heard of but not many understand. It is basically the amount of data transferred over the internet connection within a specific time. It is crucial to know how much bandwidth you are using because it can affect your hosting costs and performance.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss why it’s important to choose a plan that provides enough bandwidth for your website’s needs and show you how you can accurately estimate what amount of bandwidth would be best for you.
What is Web Hosting Bandwidth?
Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data that can be transferred from one location to another in a specified time, usually seconds. It is usually measured and specified as the maximum download or upload speed available for your website on a web hosting service provider’s servers. It typically includes various overage rates if you exceed these limits during an allotted billing cycle.
Bandwidth is expressed as MB (megabytes), GB (gigabytes), or TB (terabytes) per second. This number can change depending on the size, type, and volume of the content you have uploaded onto your hosting account. For example, images take up more bytes than text, so this would increase your bandwidth usage accordingly.
The average user consumes around 200-300GB per month when it comes to web traffic, but for someone with a large social media following or who operates an eCommerce site, their monthly consumption could go as high as 2000+ GBs! To avoid overage charges, ensure that you accurately estimate how much bandwidth you need before choosing a plan because these rates are based on estimated bandwidth usage.
Why is Hosting Bandwidth Crucial for a Website?
Bandwidth is essentially the capacity of the server to receive information and respond to requests from users over the web. Bandwidth is crucial for a website because the more traffic that is used by your website, the higher the costs of hosting will be. Your bandwidth needs to match up with your monthly server usage in order for you to not experience any issues with your website slowing down or becoming unresponsive due to excess traffic.
You can monitor how much bandwidth has been used on a daily basis, so when it reaches 80-90% capacity, this means that you need to upgrade your package if needed and potentially even purchase an additional one depending on what kind of content is being shared through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter which consume quite a lot of bandwidth as well.
How to Calculate Your Bandwidth Needs?
The simplest way to understand your bandwidth needs is to ask yourself this question: How much data am I expecting my users or customers to upload and download every month? This should help you know how many GB/TB of traffic will go through your site per month.
For example, if each user can upload up to 100 MB worth of files on your website daily (which is not bad), then they are expected to transfer around 300GB of data monthly. Now imagine an e-commerce store that gets lots of orders almost every day; it’s safe to assume that they will get more than 20-30 transactions a day, so their total amount of transferred data could easily be over 100 GB per month.
On the other hand, if you are running a small personal website that is not getting any traffic at all (or maybe just for your own reference), then even uploading around 50MB of data every day using something like FTP or SFTP will be enough to cover your bandwidth needs. FTP and SFTP means File Transfer Protocol and Secure File Transfer Protocol respectively and these are used for uploading files to the server
After estimating your bandwidth usage, you can now move on to calculate how much traffic a server will be able to handle based on that estimation and the associated hardware requirements. You have to take into consideration whether or not this estimate will grow in time, so it’s important for you to choose a hosting solution that allows easy scalability.
After estimating your bandwidth usage, you can now move on to calculate how much traffic a server will be able to handle based on that estimation and the associated hardware requirements. You have to take into consideration whether or not this estimate will grow in time, so it’s important for you to choose a hosting solution that allows easy scalability.
How to Choose a Web Hosting Plan with the Right Amount of Bandwidth?
When it comes to selecting the right hosting plan, you’ll find that you can choose between two types of bandwidth plans:
Unmetered Bandwidth
Most shared hosting plans are unmetered bandwidth. This type of plan allows you to use an unlimited amount of data within the allowed disk space on your account. However, when this allowance is exceeded, and the provider needs to transfer more data over their network, they reserve the right to slow down or suspend your site until another monthly cycle begins (usually at a time when traffic will be lighter). So make sure that any website you host does not exceed what can reasonably be expected in terms of web usage before signing up for such a package.
For example, if you have one million page views per month, then it’s very likely that choosing an unmetered package would be fine; however, if each day your site was receiving, say, 30,000 visits, then you would need to choose a plan more appropriate for your needs.
Metered Bandwidth
With a metered bandwidth plan, you are given a set amount of bandwidth every month. This means that once this allowance is used up, your website or server can no longer be accessed until the next billing cycle begins. If you decide to go with such a package, it’s best if you make sure you know how much traffic your site gets on an average day. This way you can accurately determine the monthly bandwidth requirement for your website.
If you are unsure of how much bandwidth is required by your website or if this number changes throughout the month, then it’s always a good idea to go with a metered bandwidth plan so that you’re not overpaying for what you don’t need. For example, if you are expecting your website to get around 1,000 visits per day and your hosting plan has a 10GB monthly bandwidth limit, then this should be more than enough; but, if your website starts to get more than 5,000 visits a day, then you’ll need to upgrade your hosting plan.
Choosing the right bandwidth for your website is an important decision that should not be taken lightly. By estimating how much data will be transferred on a monthly basis, you can ensure that you are selecting a hosting plan with the correct amount of bandwidth. In any case, as a general rule of thumb, as your website grows you should always be prepared to upgrade from an unmetered to a metered bandwidth plan or vice versa.
Conclusion
To sum it up, bandwidth is essential for a website because it is what allows the site to function and be accessible to users. You need to calculate your bandwidth needs in order to choose the right hosting plan and ensure that your website’s performance does not suffer as a result of excess traffic. For most websites, an unmetered bandwidth plan will be more than enough; however, if your website is expecting a large amount of traffic, then you’ll need to upgrade to a metered bandwidth plan. By following the steps in this guide, you can be sure that you are making the best decision for your website.
Get in touch with the expert team at Bigrock for better insight into bandwidth usage and for choosing the right hosting plan for your needs!
