You as a website owner might want several people to visit your website right?
Of course your website is going to offer the best experience for your visitors and for this you will need a lot of bandwidth.
Thinking why?
Here’ the reason:
A lot of text, images, and many lines of code are what make your website the best platform. All these things when combined together contribute to your website’s data. When a visitor browses your website, it is important to send all this data to his computer or mobile device.
The term bandwidth technically is the rate of data transfer of a computer network. You can easily view the bandwidth usage in your web hosting packages, similar to your mobile phone plan. When you do the internet recharge for your phone, you get a fixed amount of data, or, you might buy a “unlimited” plan. Your web hosting bandwidth is similar to that, except, instead of having the impact on your phone usage, it controls the amount of data your website can send.
Your website data depends on your website content.
Let’s take an example of YouTube.
Suppose the YouTube’s homepage is of 3 megabytes (MB). If 10 people want to watch a video on YouTube, it needs to have 30 MB bandwidth to send its homepage to them. YouTube won’t be able to send its homepage to anyone, if the bandwidth is less which means no one will be able to access it to watch the video.
Same is the case with your website too.
If your web hosting plan doesn’t offer a sufficient amount of bandwidth, several visitors will get an error while accessing your website. This indicates you will lose all the significant traffic.
In this article, we will take a look at the below things:
- Why a high level of bandwidth is needed for your website?
- The method to calculate your exact bandwidth requirements.
- Selecting a hosting plan offering the right amount of bandwidth.
Let’s start then.
Why a High Level of Bandwidth is Needed for Your Website?
We have already taken a look at what the bandwidth is and so, you know how important it is, if people want to access your site. But, what is the reason behind having a high bandwidth?
Check the below three key reasons for having a plenty of bandwidth in your hosting plan:
Insert more media elements into your website: If you have a very less bandwidth, it won’t be possible to send your website to many people. This can happen especially when your website comprises of a lot of pictures, videos, and animations. But, if your web hosting plan offers a high level of bandwidth, then you can add the maximum amount of content to your website. Then it won’t matter, even if you don’t think about reaching your bandwidth limit.
Your website won’t crash easily: Suppose the web hosting plan you have selected offers a bandwidth to support just one thousand visitors. Suddenly, you get five thousand visitors in a month. What will happen? Most of them from the five thousand visitors won’t be able to access your website due to low bandwidth. This is one of the reasons to have more bandwidth—if your site gets a spike in traffic, all will be able to access it.
Maximum pages of your website can be viewed: Since you are building a new website, you will frequently add new web pages, such as blog posts and product pages. Therefore, it’s better to buy hosting package that offers high amount of bandwidth. Due to this, your visitors will be able to access all those new pages.
In simple words, the high is the bandwidth, the more rich content and traffic will be supported by your site.
Learn to Calculate Your Bandwidth Needs
If you are just starting your website and have fewer visitors, there isn’t the need to calculate your bandwidth requirements. A basic hosting plan will be enough for your just launched website.
However, if you have a growing website then it might reach the bandwidth limit of your current hosting plan at any time. So, you will need to upgrade to a new plan or migrate to a different hosting provider. For this, you should know the exact amount of bandwidth you need.
You can easily find that out, but first, you should remember one thing: your provider will keep a track of your bandwidth usage.
There will be some limit on the bandwidth offered in every hosting plan. You will reach near to the limit each time a visitors comes to your website.
So, let’s learn to calculate your bandwidth requirements in three simple steps:
1. Find the amount of monthly visitors your website gets: You will easily get this information in your WordPress or Google Analytics dashboard.
2. Get the average number of pageviews per visitor: In your Google Analytics or WordPress dashboard, you will get the number of pages the average person opens when he visits your website.
3. Find the average webpage size on your site: A tool like Pingdom will help you to calculate the size of your site’s web pages. Make sure you check maximum pages to get the accurate average.
After you have all three numbers, just multiply them as below:
Website Visitors per Month x Average Pageviews x Average Web Page Size
For instance, you get 7,000 visitors a month, with the average visitor opening roughly 5 web pages, and each web page is approximately 4MB in size, this means your bandwidth usage is:
7,000 x 5 x 4 = 1,40,000 MB, or 140 GB per month.
By calculating your bandwidth usage in this way, you can easily find your future bandwidth requirements.
Select a hosting plan that offers at least 50% more bandwidth than your current requirement. This is because you will get the space to add more content to your website and handle high traffic spikes during a sale or festive season.
Related: How Much Bandwidth Is Really Needed By Your Website?
How to Select a Hosting Plan with the Right Amount of Bandwidth?
After going through the hosting plans offered by several providers, you will find it easy to choose between two types of bandwidth plans:
Metered Bandwidth: You will have a strict bandwidth limit in this type of plan. For example, if you get 5 GB metered bandwidth in your hosting package, you can’t exceed that limit by a single byte too.
Unmetered Bandwidth: This type of bandwidth plan offers high flexibility. If you decide to use 10 GB worth of bandwidth, but you exceed your limit and use 15 GB or 20 GB, it won’t matter. It means this type of plan allows you to use as much bandwidth as you want except there’s an upper limit. You can always ask your hosting provider what that limit is.
There are several hosting providers that offer unmetered bandwidth in all their packages. So, you won’t need to select between metered and unmetered bandwidth.
Instead, you will need to decide between shared hosting and VPS.
You get very different bandwidth limitations with these two hosting plans. Let’s check each one of them:
Shared Hosting: In a shared hosting, you need to share the resources with other users on the server. It means your bandwidth, disk space, processing power, and more will also be shared. If you are just launching your website or your website doesn’t receive much traffic, shared hosting plan would be a good choice.
VPS hosting: VPS or virtual private server offers you dedicated resources that only your website can use. No doubt it’s more expensive than shared hosting service, but it offers a far more powerful and secure hosting package along with more bandwidth.
In VPS hosting you get the bandwidth, starting from 1 TB (1,000 GB). This amount of bandwidth is needed, if any of the following applies to you:
- You have multiple websites running, traffic-heavy websites.
- Your site receives over a million visitors per month.
- You are running an extremely content-heavy site (like an eCommerce store or news site).
In these cases, the site owner needs to purchase a VPS hosting package to meet the bandwidth needs.
As mentioned earlier, if you are just entering the online world and have fewer than 50,000 visitors per month, a shared hosting package will offer you enough bandwidth.
Related: VPS or Shared Hosting: Which is the Best for Your Business?
Final Words
At last, we recommend that you don’t think too much about bandwidth. I am not saying that it isn’t an important factor, but you can easily upgrade or downgrade your hosting package as your bandwidth requirements change over time.
Have you decided your bandwidth usage? Let us know in the comments below.
