Posted by Jerry in 
After reading my previous post about bandwidth, one might ask “how much bandwidth do I need?” Indeed, Bandwidth is often the major concern for most web owners when it comes to web hosting shopping.
With that being said, it explains why web hosting companies are racing to provide better bandwidth offer in order to win market segment. In fact some web hosts are doing more than just offering large bandwidth capacity – they offer *unlimited* bandwidth.
Bandwidth Calculation
Let’s not argue how is unlimited bandwidth possible for a moment and focus on the user side – just how much bandwidth do we really need?
A simple calculation should pretty much tells the story:
Bandwidth needed = Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors x Number of days in a month (30) x Redundant Factor
- Average Daily Visitors: The total number of monthly visitors/30.
- Average Page Size: The average size of your web page.
- Average Page Views: The average page viewed per visitors.
- Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8.
Work out on the numbers and you should come to a rough estimation on the bandwidth needed for your website.
How about website that allows download?
The calculation for websites that allow large file downloading are more or less the same with above. The only different is that you’ll need some extra bandwidth for the download process. Thus, summing up the bandwidth used for website usage and downloads should bring you to the answer.
Bandwidth needed = [(Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors) + (Average Download per day x Average File Size) ] x Number of days in a month (30) x Redundant Factor
- Average Daily Visitors: The total number of monthly visitors divide by 30.
- Average Page Size: The average size of your web page.
- Average Page Views: The average page viewed per visitors.
- Average File Size: The total file size divided to the number of files.
- Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8.
A few words on redundant bandwidth
Still following me?
Now in case you’re aware, there is a factor of safety, ranging form 50% – 80%, added in each bandwidth calculation. The reason behind this is that a redundant bandwidth (extra unused bandwidth) is crucial to allow for sudden peaks in traffics.
The higher the redundant (safety) factor, the more capable is your web server to cope with sudden peaks in traffics; which can make all the difference between a pitiful and successful site advertising campaign.
Imagine your article rise all the way to the front page of Digg.com but the server fails to cope with the sudden traffics surge – that’s how a good publicity campaign turned sour.
How can I know that my site needs more bandwidth?
If your site is consistently slow and busy, then it could certainly benefit from having more bandwidth.
High chances are your web host does not have enough redundant bandwidth to deal with normal demand; the direct solution on this will be ask for a bandwidth capacity upgrade. Switching your hosting to dedicated server might be another option as it avoids sharing your website connections with others.
Also, disabling your users to download files directly from your website might be a good option. Hosting large download-able files via a third party file hosting service often makes more economical sense. To learn more, read my list of top 10 free file hosting services.
Hosting is more than just about Bandwidth!
Apparently when it comes to choosing the right web hosting plan, there’re a lot more to be concerned than just bandwidth. Usage of server CPU, RAM, as well as database connection are as important as file transfer bandwidth capacity. In fact, without sufficient resources on these items – unlimited bandwidth are plain meaningless.
So hey, next time when you’re shopping for web hosting services, remember not to limit your eyeballs only on the bandwidth offers. Put an eye on the customer feedbacks regarding on server stability, server uptime, server load time and so on to measure on the server resources usage.
very explained good information, from my experience for average or personal site 50GB monthly bandwith is very huge
How about 1500 Terabytes per month? That is what The Piratebay uses up.
@Frank:
Yes indeed hosting offers nowadays are unbelievably cheap. There are even companies that are offering unlimited hosting capacity!
The main purpose of this blogpost, however, is not to tell you which hosting service to go for. Rather, it’s to guide users thru the bandwidth calculation process – in turn, estimate how much bandwidth do their websites need.
[...] Web hosting plan usually advertise as- 10GB data transfer per month.That means browsing your site should not consume more than 10 GB volume in a month. You can have more insight about bandwidth here and about bandwidth requirement here. [...]
[...] One good way to avoid from being fooled by the web host personnel is by educating yourself. Even if you are a non techie, make time to learn the basics in web hosting. You should at least understand the differences between various types of web hosting, pros and cons for different web host operating system, as well as some fundamental knowledge about hosting bandwidth. [...]
I think more important than bandwith is uptime at 99,9% monthly. If hosting company offers only 98% uptime better find another one.
I think you guys are pretty on it as far as bandwidth. Oh and by the way, great article! I am new to this and the calculating formula is A+! Asterhost great point, in this day and age if your host site isn’t up to the 99.9% up time standard, they are behind. I see so many resellers in my area focusing more on bandwidth, with HUGE and I mean HUGE bandwidth allotments. I never understood that so I came here to make sure I wasn’t behind the ball. I could use a touch up to the plans on bandwidth, but at least I know I am not offering wasted space.
Thanks for the article!
This a very informative article! I can say that CPU usage is the most important on a shared hosting. Most of companies will allow to use unlimited bandwidth, but will not allow to use maximum CPU.
The uptime is also very important!
Thank you for sharing this formula. I’ve been trying to figure this out and am grateful to have found this information. Do you recommend calculating the bandwidth needed on the amount of traffic we are currently getting or on what we hope to achieve? Should we make sure we can handle what we intend to service or upgrade as we go?
Very good article, however how do you calculate the bandwidth for a site that is not live yet?
I am looking into hosting pacakgaes but I am unsure how much bandwidth I’ll need, or what type of server would be best. Any information would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Amara
[...] If you wish to learn more, check out my previous input: How much bandwidth do you need? [...]
Actually I was lloking for the info how much badwidth allocation any one have but here i found only a formula even not a single exact answer about the bandwidth allocation and vsitors per day….
I suppose it depends entirely on your site(s), are they dynamic (PHP/MySQL) or static (HTML)? There is surely a limit because of resource usage, there’s probably some fineprint in the TOS?