The Concept of Bandwidth
Bandwidth refers to the amount the data transferred to the visitors computer from your web space. In other words, bandwidth refers to the amount of data transferred through the network wire in a specific period of time. When you are planning to buy a hosting service, the bandwidth that your host will suggest you, is typically counted on a monthly basis. This is mainly due to the reason that the web hosting service providers pay a huge fee for their massive broadband internet connection. This is the few that is ultimately carried over to the consumers in the form of payment against their individual service plan.
Calculation of Bandwidth
There is a simple calculation for estimating the required bandwidth size of the website. The formula is: total size of the web pages in the site x monthly traffic volume = required bandwidth. I know it sounds confusing, but here is a brief explanation of the formula along with an example.
Say, you have 5 web pages in your website and the average size of the web pages is 70 KB. That means, the total size of the web pages in your site is 70 x 5 = 350 KB. Now, if your expected traffic volume is 3000 per month, your required bandwidth should be 350 x 3000 = 2.1GB per month. This is the simplest formula for calculating web hosting bandwidth. However, this does not mean each visitor will view all the 5 pages, so it could be less. On the other hand, if you offer any downloads or media on your website, you should take them into consideration as well when calculating the bandwidth. Also remember that .php pages are heavier than .html static pages.
Bandwidth Management
If your site allows download facility, make it sure that your web hosting plan combines enough bandwidth option. Offering download facility for software, music, flash or video files requires sufficient bandwidth support. In fact, if you only host PDF files on your server, it will take at least 1GB bandwidth in your web space.
Therefore, if you want to manage the bandwidth size, you should be careful enough about choosing the web site components in order to keep the size minimum. As a matter of fact, you need to make the web page size as minimum as possible, because that way not only you won’t need to pay crazy fees for hosting, but also offer visitors a fast loading website, which is always a plus. Try not to use lots of heavy images in your web pages and when you use images, do not forget to optimize them for web. Moreover, you must not allow multiple files downloading feature and try to keep them under 1MB of size.
No matter what your estimate is, there is always a chance of failure, so you must not forget to look at the fee for exceeding bandwidth in your monthly web hosting plan.
