How much bandwidth do I need ?

Determining how much bandwidth is necessary for a particular hosting situation is a difficult task. We usually don't track our personal usage close enough to have a clear idea of our needs. And while the amount of bandwidth alloted for a given hosting plan may seem very generous, overage costs are mostly quite high with underestimated bandwidth needs. Here are some guidelines to help you estimate how much bandwidth you may need for any given hosting setup.

First, identify your hosting needs. Particularly, what servers are you planning on hosting, and the rough number of expected users? If hosting servers with potentially large bandwidth needs, what content do you plan to provide? How much bandwidth you require varies widely based upon these factors. For example, even personal sites can use a lot of bandwidth if they host podcasts, photos or other large files that can quickly become popular.

One logical method for calculating bandwidth necessary for hosting a website is multiplying: site visitors by page views by average page size by days per month by safety factor. This can help determine if any given hosting plan will meet your needs. It can also help assess whether the current provider is able to keep meeting visitor demand as popularity grows and, if not, to determine when action is necessary and what
steps you should take.

The safety factor in the above equation is crucial to take into account, and should generally fall between 1.5 and 2.0. Essentially, this number guarantees you bandwidth flexibility that may come in handy with sudden spikes in popularity. It may seem tempting to do away with this variable and cut costs, still an unavailable site can spell the difference between a successful venture and a failed one. What is more, extra fees for using too much bandwidth can easily reduce the savings you made by cutting the costs on bandwidth.

There are various ways to use bandwidth more efficiently when necessary. Much can be saved by offloading some hosting to specialized systems which, while not as flexible as typical web hosts, are particularly optimized for specific types of content or for other large files. Podcasts, music, photos and other forms of media can be hosted on third-party sites optimized for such needs, and can be linked to from your main site. Also, generic solutions such as Amazon's Simple Storage System (S3) enable efficient and inexpensive hosting of large volumes of data.

Nowaday many web hosts set up very high limits of bandwidth or even none at all. Still, it's important not to sacrifice quality solutions just because they offer less bandwidth than their competition. Bandwidth is one of many factors that make up a quality host, but it can easily become inflated by web hosts who offer high limits being certain that most users will come nowhere near them. Such solutions usually attract customers, but can easily backfire when servers turn out to be over-provisioned and bandwidth becomes scarce. By becoming aware of roughly how much bandwidth is necessary, and by knowing what options are available should you find yourself near your limit, you can effectively avoid this trap and choose the host that best meets your specific needs. Also if you are planning to host large amount of videos or images you might need to look into vps solutions or dedicated servers.

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