How to Calculate Hosting Bandwidth Usage?

 You want as many individuals to visit your website as feasible.

If you want all of those visitors to have a pleasant experience, you’ll need a lot of bandwidth.

The reason is:

Your website is composed of content, images, and several lines of code. All of this is referred to as your website’s data, and when someone visits your website, you must transfer all of that data to their computer or mobile devices.

Technically, bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate of a computer network. However, in the context of web hosting packages, it’s better to think of it as your mobile phone plan.

You may have a phone plan that allows you to use a certain amount of data, or you may have an “unlimited” plan. Your web hosting bandwidth is similar, except, instead of influencing your phone consumption, it governs how much data your website can transfer.

Depending on the content of your site, there might be a lot of data.

For instance, YouTube’s homepage is 2 megabytes (MB) in size.

Suppose ten people visit it, YouTube requires 20MB of bandwidth to deliver its homepage to them. Without enough bandwidth, YouTube would be unable to deliver its homepage to anyone, preventing anyone from accessing their website to view videos.

The same thing applies to your website.

Many of your visitors will be unable to access your website if your hosting plan does not include enough bandwidth. As a result, you will lose a lot of valuable visitors.

In this article, we will demonstrate

• Why do you need a lot of bandwidth for your website?

• How to calculate your bandwidth requirement accurately?

• How to select a hosting plan with sufficient bandwidth?

Let us go through each point individually.

Why Do You Require a Large Amount of Bandwidth?

We have already addressed bandwidth, so you know it’s crucial if visitors are going to be able to access your site. But why is it necessary to have a lot of it?

Here are three major reasons why you should have enough bandwidth in your hosting plan:

• Your website can include additional media elements:

If you only have a limited amount of bandwidth, you won’t be able to deliver your website to a large number of people, especially if it has a lot of images, videos, or animations. However, if you have a large amount of bandwidth, you will be able to add as much material to your website as you want without worrying about surpassing your bandwidth limit.

• Your website will be less likely to crash:

Assume your plan has enough bandwidth to accommodate a thousand visits per month, but you receive five thousand in a single month. Most of the 5000 visitors would be unable to view your website due to a shortage of bandwidth. That is a good reason to have extra bandwidth—if your site has an increase in traffic, everyone will be able to view it.

• Your visitors can view more pages of your website:

If you're creating a website that will have a lot of new pages, such as blog entries and product pages, it's a good idea to purchase a hosting package with a lot of bandwidth. If you do this, your visitors will be able to see all the new pages.

In other words, the more bandwidth you have, the more rich information and traffic your site can handle.

How to Calculate Your Bandwidth Requirements?

If you are just starting with your website and don’t have many visitors yet, you don’t need to access your bandwidth needs. A basic hosting plan will suffice till your audience expands.

However, if you've hit the bandwidth limit of your existing hosting plan and wish to upgrade to a new plan or switch to a different hosting provider, you should know exactly how much bandwidth you require.

It’s simple to figure out, but there’s one thing you should bear in mind: your provider will track your bandwidth, keeping a running total of how much data your website has delivered.

Every hosting plan has some kind of bandwidth limit, and you’ll come closer to that limit every time someone visits your website.

With that stated, here’s a three-step process for calculating your bandwidth requirements:

• In the first step, determine how many monthly visitors your website receives. The data is easily accessible through your WordPress or Google Analytics panel.

• In the second step, determine the average number of pageviews per guest. Again, you can look into how many pages the typical visitor opens when they visit your website, in your Google Analytics or WordPress dashboard.

• In the third step, determine the average page size on your website. To determine the size of your site's web pages, Use a program like Pingdom. Check as many pages as possible so that the average is more accurate.

Once you have all three numbers, just multiply them as follows:

Monthly website visitors x average pageviews x average web page size

You may anticipate your future bandwidth requirements by evaluating your bandwidth consumption in this manner.

Choosing a Hosting Plan with Right Amount of Bandwidth

When reviewing the hosting plans provided by most providers, you will notice that you have a choice between two sorts of bandwidth plans:

• Metered bandwidth: This sort of bandwidth is strictly limited. For example, if your hosting service includes 10 GB of metered bandwidth, you cannot exceed that limit by a single byte.

•  Unmetered bandwidth: This sort of bandwidth package provides you with greater flexibility. It makes no difference if you expect to use 10 GB of bandwidth but end up consuming 15 GB or 20 GB instead. While plans like these theoretically enable you to utilize as much bandwidth as you like, there is clearly an upper limit. You'll have to check with your hosting provider to find out what that restriction is.

Most hosting companies include unmetered bandwidth in all of their services, so you won't have to pick between metered and unmetered bandwidth.

Instead, you'll have to choose between shared hosting and virtual private servers (VPS).

How to select a hosting plan with sufficient bandwidth?

These are two separate types of hosting services with vastly differing bandwidth constraints. Here's a breakdown of each:

• Shared Hosting: Your website shares resources with other websites in a shared hosting environment. This implies that you will be sharing bandwidth, storage space, processor power, and other resources. If you're just starting or your website doesn't receive a lot of traffic, shared hosting is a decent option.

• VPS: A virtual private server, often known as a VPS, is a type of hosting service that provides you with dedicated resources that only your website can utilize. While it is usually more expensive than shared hosting, the advantage is that you receive a considerably more robust and secure hosting plan with significantly more bandwidth.

If you choose a VPS plan, you will receive bandwidth starting at 1 TB (1,000 GB). If any of the following apply to you, you may require that sort of bandwidth:

• You run several high-traffic websites.

• Your website receives over a million visitors each month.

• You have a very content-heavy website (like an eCommerce store or news site).

In these cases, site owners must generally acquire a VPS hosting plan to meet their bandwidth requirements.

As previously said, if you're just getting started, say, with less than 50,000 visits per month, a shared hosting service would suffice.

Finally, we recommend that you don't worry too much about bandwidth. Not because bandwidth isn't vital, but because it's incredibly simple to upgrade or downgrade your hosting package, as your bandwidth needs vary over time.

Source: https://www.htshosting.org/knowledge-base/web-hosting/280/how-to-calculate-hosting-bandwidth-usage