Bandwidth of the website is the actual amount of data transferred through the website at one time. The whole range of web hosting works on this parameter. If you have lesser bandwidth, it may hamper the speed of your website. There is a particular amount of data which has to be transferred through the website that has to be calculated wisely; otherwise you may land up making your website unavailable for the visitors.

Bandwidth is generally misunderstood with data transfer. They both are different practically and in terms of terminology. Data transfer is more discrete function; it signifies the actual data which has to be transferred every time your website loads. Bandwidth is a vehicle of certain capacity which transmits the data.

How to calculate the bandwidth?

With so many visitors browsing your website per day it is certainly difficult to identify the precise bandwidth needed. When you quantify all the parameters related to the bandwidth, it is simpler to arrive at a particular amount. It is necessary to understand what each terminology stands for in the bandwidth calculation.

Bandwidth can be called as the conducting medium of the data. You will have to identify the exact volume of data that should be flowing through your website once it is loaded on the browser. Web hosting service providers need this magnitude of data transfer in order to give you the appropriate plan.

Calculation of the bandwidth

Your website’s bandwidth can be calculated using a simple formula which uses size of your website, number of pages your website has and number of visitors your expect for your website in a day. It is a simple multiplication which derives the monthly bandwidth required for the website.

Say for example, you have 3 pages on your website and on an average including graphics, images etc. your page size comes to around 40KB. You may have 80 visitors on your website in a day and they might take a look at all the three pages. So the bandwidth of your website per day should be

40KB X 80 visitors X 3 pages= 9600 KB

The webhosting service provider will be keen on knowing the bandwidth you require on monthly basis as they would be having appropriate plans for the same.

In order to estimate the bandwidth for 30 days you will have to simply multiply per day bandwidth with 30. So, as per the above specification you might need 288000 KB bandwidth which can be converted into GB as 0.288 GB/month.

Website and Bandwidth

The above calculation looks easy but in practical it is tough to calculate the exact amount, so should you decide on your bandwidth just with a guess work? Not necessarily. Having one estimate and scaling it as per your requirement is the trick behind it.

Websites can be broadly categorized as huge, medium and small websites. Huge websites categorically has large amount of content on it and attract enormous traffic wherein small websites have lesser amount of data mostly in terms of text and has less pages. The traffic for the slow websites can be slighter. Based on the size of your website and a foresight of how many visitors will be visiting your website, you can arrive at the bandwidth limit.

Web host and bandwidth

Web hosting plans and bandwidth are directly proportional to each other. If the bandwidth requisite of your website is more, you will have to choose among the hosting plans offering huge bandwidth.

Generally, website bandwidth is miscalculated resulting in a misinterpreting the web hosting plan resulting in either having too much bandwidth or too less of it to cope up with the actual traffic of the website.

Your involvement and focus on the bandwidth requirement of the website from the very first day of its inception can ensure that you will choose a web hosting plan with exact bandwidth requirement.

Here are some stepladders to accomplish the same.

• File size of your website should be minimal. Make use of several online tools available on the internet which tells you the page size. These tools can also compress the web pages in order to make it compact.
• Use image compression tools while uploading images and keep the number of images to minimal.
• Have a check on the number of file which you are offering for download and keep it to minimum. Try keeping the file size as low as possible

Now, as you know that your page size is minimal, you have compressed images on the website and you know the exact size of the files you are offering for download. This makes you understand the basic bandwidth requirement of your website. And there are chances that with these measures you will be arriving at the optimal limit of the bandwidth.

Scaling the bandwidth

Generally, the bandwidth required for the websites do not exceed the limit of 9-10GB per month in case you are using media files in moderation. Let us say that an average website will be requiring 8GB per month bandwidth and keeping it as a threshold you are choosing a plan which serves you with the required bandwidth. For example, in a particular month your website has got huge traffic increasing the bandwidth requirement, the question arises whether you should change the web hosting plan. The obvious answer is no. In order for your website not getting choked up you can keep some buffer while choosing the web hosting plan. These buffers help you scale the bandwidths whenever the need arises.

Please have a look at the following aspects which can influence the bandwidth of your website.

• Changes in the Layout: Changes in the layout can work both the ways, it can either increase the size of the website, increasing the bandwidth or it can decrease the same. Have layout changes which affect your bandwidth minimally.
• Growth in the Traffic: There is a factor of good fortune behind increased traffic. Consider this as one of the important factors affecting the bandwidth.
• Adding More: Increasing more pages on your website shall certainly increase the pageviews causing in the bandwidth surge.Having more than one domain can also result in increased bandwidth
• Traffic Points: Sudden increase in traffic can be a consequence of doubled bandwidth usage.

Unlimited Bandwidth

To all the above issues there is only one resolution of using unlimited bandwidth. It will enable you to scale the bandwidth as per the requirement. But it is equally important to understand how much bandwidth constitutes to the unlimited option.

Numerous web hosting providers offer bandwidth claiming that it is unlimited but at the end of the month you may end up paying huge some. For example, you might have chosen unlimited plan but in reality it may only offer using first 5GB for free. So, it is important to carefully read the terms and conditions of a web hosting plan. This might save you paying up the additional hidden cost. Good news is that WebHostNepal does not participate in these hidden costs. We will never charge you for additional bandwidth on our unlimited plans.

What is not allowed in the unlimited plan?

The following are not allowed in the unlimited plan:

• Content which you cannot distribute
• File sharing/archive/mirroring sites
• Site which diverts the traffic to another site
• Sharing your account details with general public

More than unlimited bandwidth, unmetered bandwidth is the best option wherein you can use as much bandwidth as you want at a fixed price. This is least risky on the part of the buyer.

Most of the web hosting providers thrive on the basic bandwidth requirement of the websites which will sparingly use bandwidth of not more than some gigabytes. For the website owners there are enough options to choose from unless you have exclusive requirement of extra bandwidth.

Summing it up

There are some significant issues which are to be considered for deciding the bandwidth requirement of the website. Quantification of bandwidth using the above formula and checking it with all the possible and available tools is necessary in order to reinforce your calculation. Bandwidth calculation is as important as trying to reduce the bandwidth requirement of your website. Some simple steps mentioned above will surely aid in decreasing the overall requirement.It is necessary to understand the factors affecting the bandwidth of the website. This will help you to enforce some restriction on the bandwidth wherever it is necessary and vice-versa. You should be careful while selecting offers provided by web hosts for unlimited bandwidth as it can be just a mirage. Choose for unmetered bandwidth instead to have fixed fees on unlimited usage.

Ultimately, when you will identify the number of cars passing through the tunnel, you will be able to know the exact size of the tunnel. This is the same case with the data your website unloads and the bandwidth. Knowing the size shall help you choosing the web hosting platform but it is thorough and diligent monitoring of the traffic, files downloads and file sizes which will give you the best results of the chosen web hosting plan.