Whenever you choose a web hosting service the one challenging thing that you have to predict and allocate is the amount of hosting bandwidth. We see most newbies are not that much familiar with the term “bandwidth.” And therefore, they do not get the right idea how much they would need. If you’re one of them, this post is for you.
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What is Hosting Bandwidth?
Bandwidth is a service provided by hosting providers. It describes the level of traffic. It also marks out the amount of data transferring between a website, users and the worldwide web. It is an important thing that every website owner must see in advance when choosing a hosting provider.
Luckily, there is no shortage of renowned web hosting providers that focus on offering high bandwidth hosting along with excellent customer support, security, server space, and uptime.
Nowadays, hosting providers provide a maximum level of bandwidth for their tier of hosting plans. Seeing these tiers, you can have a good indication of which company has the best Network, Connection, and Systems. The more your bandwidth will be the faster and better these three components would be.
However, it advisable that you avoid attractive-looking unlimited bandwidth plan (we will explore it the section below). The reason is most of the time they are not what they seem.
Let’s Explore Unlimited Bandwidth
Many companies offer attractive hosting plans that include unlimited hosting bandwidth as we said above. When buyers go for these plans, they think that they can run as much data and traffic as they need without any stop. However, for hosting companies, it means a way to give a fixed price to buyers.
We would say that truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Remember that, it is difficult for hosting companies to give unlimited bandwidth because it would be too expensive to offer unbridled access to every user.
Bandwidth and the Relationship with Web Traffic.
Let’s understand it with an example. Imagine that hosting bandwidth is the number of tables in an eating house, and the web traffic is the diners. The calculation is simple: The more tables in the eatery, the more people can dine there at any one time.
How to Calculate Bandwidth Requirement?
When choosing a web hosting provider make sure you are getting the right amount of bandwidth. You can think of hosting bandwidth as a pant. You need the size that you need.
It doesn’t make a sense that you buy an upside. At the same time, you can’t go for a size that does not fit you properly. If your waist size is 32, you can’t buy pant that is 34 or 30.
Here is what you can do to calculate your bandwidth requirement.
As we said above, in hosting bandwidth it doesn’t make sense to buy up, you should look for hosting company offering scalable solutions. You may try the following method to calculate your actual requirement.
-Calculate the average page size of your web page/website in kilobytes.
-Multiply that page size (in kilobytes) by the monthly average number of visitors.
-Now multiply the result from step 2 by the average number of page views per visitor.
This is one useful method to know your hosting bandwidth requirements.
Note: Do not forget to include an allocation for extra room; it will help you in case of traffic spikes.
Factors that can affect the bandwidth your website needs
Traffic Growth: If you are following a good marketing strategy, it may cause a sudden growth in traffic of your site. And you will need more bandwidth hosting. Sometimes, unexpected traffic spikes generated by social news websites can cause bandwidth usage to double.
Layout Changes: If you are changing the layout of your website, it may increase the size of your page, and you will need more bandwidth every month.
You Add More Pages: When you add more pages to your site, the number of page views increases as well. It would automatically increase bandwidth usage.
Finally, we have come to the end of this post. We learned what precisely a hosting bandwidth is and how we can calculate it. So next time, whenever you buy a hosting service, don’t forget to estimate your bandwidth requirements.