Bandwidth...How much do I need?

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webline

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One of the most common concerns people have when deciding to host a web site is figuring out how much bandwidth they’ll need.

If you get too little bandwidth you might be hit with overage fees or have your web site shut off altogether. Get too much and you’re paying for bandwidth that you don’t really need. So how do you know how much bandwidth to get when selecting a plan? :uhh:

Easy. A simple multiplication formula which uses size of your website, number of pages your website has and number of visitors your expect for your website in a day will derive the monthly bandwidth required for the website.

So for example: You have 4 pages on your site and your page size is around 40KB. Suppose you expect about 60 visitors a day with each visitor viewing each page; the bandwidth of your website per day should be:

40KB x 60 visitors x 4 pages=9600 KB
 
webline said:
So for example: You have 4 pages on your site and your page size is around 40KB. Suppose you expect about 60 visitors a day with each visitor viewing each page; the bandwidth of your website per day should be:

40KB x 60 visitors x 4 pages=9600 KB
Click to expand...

Nice example. That would be about 0.28 GB a month. Not very much!

I would like to add that your site can be 100 pages and the bw would be the same if there is an average of 4 page views per day.

This is why I don't bother limiting bw in a multi-tiered quota-based arrangement. 99.5% of all sites suitable for a shared hosting environment will fall well within reasonable values. And when you consider that the web pages in today's modern web sites are generated on the fly by scripts there is really no need to limit disk space either.

So your question:" How do you know how much bandwidth to get when selecting a plan "does not have to be asked in a so-called unlimited plan
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Nice example, but I suggest also a second simple formula to add downloadable file weight (for example a free ebook).

[40KB x 60 visitors x 4 pages] + [10 files downloaded per day * 750 KB (average file size)]

This add 7.5 MB everyday, so it's about 232 MB more every month...
 
webline said:
One of the most common concerns people have when deciding to host a web site is figuring out how much bandwidth they’ll need.

So for example: You have 4 pages on your site and your page size is around 40KB. Suppose you expect about 60 visitors a day with each visitor viewing each page; the bandwidth of your website per day should be:

40KB x 60 visitors x 4 pages=9600 KB
Click to expand...


Which gives 9600x30= 28000 Kbit a month approximately. Even the cheapest hosting solutions offer many times more usually, I fully agree to Collabora on this one.
 
helix247 said:
Please elaborate where there seemed to be confusion between bandwidth and traffic.
Click to expand...

Generally speaking, bandwidth is the size of the network pipe while traffic is the amount of data transferred. The terms are often used interchangeably, but should not be, technically speaking. The calculations above are really traffic calculations. Bandwidth limits traffic.

On the other hand, "web traffic" may simply be the visitors, page views, etc independent of any bandwidth issues.
 
Unfortunately, CPanel, DirectAdmin et al have used the term bandwidth incorrectly, so everyone uses the term incorrectly.
So much so that many firms now refer to bandwidth as transit.
 
In today's market it doesn't matter if you get more than you need. Majority of hosts offer enough bandwidth that will keep you solid for a while. Space is normally the issue.
 
romes said:
In today's market it doesn't matter if you get more than you need. Majority of hosts offer enough bandwidth that will keep you solid for a while. Space is normally the issue.
Click to expand...

As a host, I find that cpu, ram and disk i/o are the biggest issue. 99% of sites suitable for a shared environment are less than a couple of gigs. Modern web sites are created by server-side scripting and pages are created on the fly when requested by browser. This is where cpu and ram become the limiting factor. And disk space is relatively cheap.

Throw in imap email, and then inodes/files numbers become an issue.

Thus between diskspace and "bandwidth" almost all web sites suitable for a shared environment can be hosted on most host's "Plan A." Plan B and Plan C are rarely needed.
 
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Yes, unless you are doing some time of ffmpeg or image hosting, then most of the images are cached when the first page loads, and then the rest is mostly text download on the rest of the pages.

5gb month is more than suitable for 80-90% of the websites out there.

So, I was tell people don't really worry about the bandwidth for one website or even 10 websites and if you need a little more bandwidth to keep up with your website, some host will throw you an extra 5GB of transfer for free.

But yes that formula does give a slight hint of needs.
 
To be honest for a small website / one newly opened 10 GB Bandwidth is more then enough to be on the safe side.
 
It is difficult to calculate the traffic because if your website is being attacked, you will see traffic spike and it will change your bandwidth calculation. In shared hosting, you can get enough bandwidth from the most of the providers. If you are reaching to your limit, it is time to think about VPS because in shared hosting resources are limited and if your account uses more resources, your service may be interrupted by your provider.
 
Based on my shared hosting's statistics, most websites don't need more than 1 GB of bandwidth. Sadly most websites don't receive any traffic.
 
The most "bandwidth" I've ever went through was 10GB/month, but that is with a large number of views and multiple websites on one plan.

Out of everything, VPS's/Dedicated servers are what cause the majority of bandwidth usage. I've seen VPS's that have 100GB's+ of space used have 90+GB bandwidth usage, and most of the space/bandwidth is for websites that allow downloadable content. To be honest, if your website is using over 5-10GB bandwidth a month, you have a good bit of money/potential money coming from that website. So you should never have to worry about the bandwidth.

You can do math etc, but the best websites are the ones you can't truly measure the traffic because it's growing.
 
RobertM said:
To be honest, if your website is using over 5-10GB bandwidth a month, you have a good bit of money/potential money coming from that website. So you should never have to worry about the bandwidth.

You can do math etc, but the best websites are the ones you can't truly measure the traffic because it's growing.
Click to expand...

Not in all cases. If there is a downloadable or file available for streaming, 1 visitor can take a rather large amount of bandwidth. If I were to stream a HD movie for example the number of visitors to 'potential revenue' is very low.
 
webline said:
If you get too little bandwidth you might be hit with overage fees or have your web site shut off altogether. Get too much and you’re paying for bandwidth that you don’t really need.
Click to expand...
Years ago bandwidth was expensive so you did have to be careful about what you used, but today that's no longer the case and bandwidth ....or data transfer is a heck of a lot cheaper. DC's provide most hosting company's with far more bandwith than their likely to use and this usually gets past on to the clients in hosting plans so the vast majority of clients don't have to worry about bandwith usage.
 
This is quite an old thread, so I won't add much.

I always place a limit on any hosting package's bandwidth, although with most sites, good luck with reaching that limit, you're doing something well and getting lots of traffic.

The reason for this is that I like to discourage Warez sites and other software download sites taking the mickey. Warez are against our T & C, but as our packages offer large chunks of diskspace we have often attracted these folks, who think they can get away with it, despite us turning them off when we find them. (Usually within the first 24 hours).

Since we started to place limits on bandwidth, such people have tended to steer clear.

Also some 3 years back we had a small distrubution of Linux hosted on one of our small £5 a month packages, that did more than 20TB of traffic a month, which 3 years ago would have cost more than the £5 charged. Whilst this did not damage or overwhelm the server, it damaged our profits.

We've got no problem with hosting such sites, but they have to pay their way, otherwise we go bankrupt and all our other customers would suffer.
 
You will need a Total of 3GB of Data Transfer aka "bandwidth"

why i say you want 3GB?
you dont want to run out if you get more people on your site.
 
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