You want to buy a web hosting service but recently came across the term “bandwidth” and wondering what it really is? Well, in this article, I will explain what web hosting bandwidth is and how much of it is enough for your website.
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What is Web Hosting Bandwidth?
Web hosting bandwidth is the total amount of data transfer from your website to your visitors. It includes uploading and downloading of data from your website back to your visitors. The hosting bandwidth is generally calculated in a span of a month.
Let’s understand it more efficiently, for example, you visit Facebook.com and spend 1 GB of your LTE/Broadband data while browsing the site or maybe downloading pictures of your friends. On the other hand, Facebook has to transfer you 1 GB of data in return as well (also known as hosting). So the total amount of Facebook Bandwidth is 1 GB. This amount of Bandwidth will keep on increasing when more people will browse Facebook.
What is an Unmetered Bandwidth?
Unmetered bandwidth means you are allowed to use an unlimited amount of bandwidth as long as you are not causing any concern to the hosting provider itself. In other words, you can exceed the general bandwidth quota but for only a short period. Failing to this causes your account suspended. More than 95% of shared web hosting companies use this term to sell their web hosting package.
What is True Unlimited Bandwidth Usage?
When a web hosting company allows you to use the bandwidth as much as you want freely, it’s known as “True Unlimited Bandwidth”. There are no restrictions what so ever. In other words, you can host your website to millions of visitors per month. Only 5% of shared web hosting companies have the “True Unlimited Bandwidth” feature.
Understanding the Sufficiency of Bandwidth
Almost every web hosting company have a specific amount of bandwidth locked on their web hosting package. That is why it is critical to know how much amount of bandwidth you have required for your website. Now, I will explain it with a general formula
Total Bandwidth = Visitors x Page Views x Page Weight x File Size x File Download
Here are the general scenarios to choose sufficiency bandwidth
- For low traffic (less than 5,000 monthly), Average website bandwidth usage is around 20 GB
- 50 GB or less bandwidth is enough for less than 20,000 visitors per month (no direct downloads)
- If you allow the direct download to your visitors than you should get 10 times more bandwidth than normal
- 500 GB or more bandwidth is required for high traffic website with 200,000 visitors (no direct downloads)
Why is Bandwidth Important for a Website?
Unfortunately, Webspace only allows you to upload your files online. However, if you want to serve them to the public, Bandwidth is an essential factor. With bandwidth, you can serve your data to the world wide web, depends on your bandwidth usage.
How to Save My Hosting Bandwidth?
There are two easy ways to do this.
- Optimize your web pages
- Using Cloudflare CDN cache
- Use less multimedia on your website
Calculate Bandwidth
Using this link, you can calculate a rough figure of your monthly bandwidth usage. Basically, this website will track the page file of your website and estimate the monthly bandwidth as a result.