The majority of hosting companies have a choice of bandwidth options in their plans. So, what exactly is bandwidth in the context of web hosting? In simple terms, bandwidth is the amount of traffic allowed between your website and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is controlled by their network connection, both inside and outside their data center.
Network Connectivity
In its most basic form, the Internet is a network that connects millions of computers. These internet connections can be quite large or small, depending on the cabling and equipment used at a particular internet address.
The amount of bandwidth available is determined by the size of each network connection. For example, if you connect to the Internet using DSL, you have a bandwidth of 1.54 Megabits (Mb). As a result, bandwidth is measured in bits (one number 0 or 1). Bits are organized into bytes, which consist of words, text, and other data transmitted between your computer and the internet.
If you have a DSL internet connection, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet service provider. Your internet service provider, on the other hand, may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connections are combined on your internet service provider, who then have their dedicated internet connection (or multiple connections) that are significantly larger than your single connection.
They should have adequate bandwidth to meet your processing needs as well as the demands of all their other clients. So, even if you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet, which allows it to meet your needs as well as the needs of up to 166 additional subscribers (255/1.54).
Traffic
Think of highways and cars as simple comparisons to understand bandwidth and traffic. The number of lanes on the highway is represented by bandwidth, while the number of cars on the highway is represented by traffic. You can go pretty fast if you’re the only car on the highway. If you’re stuck during rush hour, you might go very slowly because all lanes are full.
Traffic is the number of bits transferred on a network connection. It is easiest to understand traffic by using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the power of 30 (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1, 024 megabytes. To give you an idea, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 filing cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters – One GB is all the characters present in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB in size, the same song in wav format is about 40MB in size, and a full-length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).
If you transfer these MP3 songs from a website to your computer, you will create 4MB of traffic between the website you are downloading from and your computer. Depending on the network connection between the website and the internet, the transfer can happen very quickly, or it can be time-consuming if other people are also downloading files at the same time.
If the website you are downloading from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing the website to download MP3s, then your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that website. However, if three people download the same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic is created. Since in this example, the host only has 10MB bandwidth, one has to wait.
The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person who downloads the file and transfer a small portion at a time so that everyone’s file transfer can be done, but the transfer for everyone who downloads the file will be slower. If 100 people come to the site and download MP3s at the same time, the transfer will be very slow.
If web owners want to reduce the time it takes to download files simultaneously, they can increase the bandwidth of their internet connection, at a higher cost due to equipment upgrades.
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Bandwidth Hosting
Every time you visit a website, you generate traffic because, to view that web page on your computer, it must first be downloaded to your computer (between the website and you), and then displayed using your browser software. This page is simply a file that generates traffic, similar to the MP3 file in the previous example, although the web page is often much smaller than the music file.
A web page can be very small or very large, depending on the amount of information and the amount and quality of images included. The main page measuring 70-200KB is still classified as having a normal size.
How Much Bandwidth is Ideal?
Depending on, because bandwidth is a significant determinant of the price of a hosting plan, you should take the time to determine how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements that are measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth your site will need each month
If you do not intend to provide the ability to download files from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is quite easy:
Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor
If you intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be:
[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) + (Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor
Let’s check each item in the formula:
Average Daily Visitors – The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending on how you market your site, this number can range from 1 to 1,000,000.
Average Page Views – On average, the number of web pages you expect someone to see. If you have 50 web pages on your website, the average person may only see those 5 pages each time they visit.
Average Page Size – The average size of your web page, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have designed your site, you can calculate it directly.
Average Daily File Downloads – The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. It is a function of the number of visitors and the number of times visitors download files, on average, each day.
Average File Size – The average file size of files that can be downloaded from your site. As with your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can count them directly.
Fudge Factor – A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safer, which assumes that your estimate misses 50%. However, if you are very unsure, you can use 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth needs are more than met.
Typically, hosting plans offer bandwidth in Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why in the formula take the daily average and multiply it by 31.
Summary
Most personal or small company websites will not use more than 1GB of monthly bandwidth. If your website consists of static web pages and you expect minimal traffic regularly, choose a low bandwidth plan. If you exceed the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting provider may charge a usage fee, therefore if you anticipate a high volume of visitors to your site, you should run the above calculations to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in the hosting plan.