Web Development

How to Calculate the Bandwidth Required by a Website?

Before choosing a hosting service, you need to consider many factors, of which computing bandwidth is the most challenging one. Bandwidth refers to the total amount of data transferred from your host server to your guest’s computer over a period of time. Unlike desktop storage, you only need to delete a portion of the large images and videos to control it. Bandwidth needs to be carefully calculated because if there are many visitors viewing or downloading large files from your website, your website may be closed midway.

In fact, there are a lot of hosting companies that offer several bandwidth options in their plans, so you can choose a bandwidth of the right size so that you don’t waste money. But how do you know how much bandwidth you need? We will answer this question in detail.

 

How much bandwidth does a website need?

In fact, it’s easy to calculate how much bandwidth you need. You just need to record the daily activities of your website and do a math calculation.

  • Estimate the average number of bytes in a page on your site, in KB
  • Estimate your estimated daily visits to your site
  • Estimate the average number of visits per person you expect
  • Multiply the results of the above three steps and multiply by the number of days in a month, that is, 30

This simple formula is very intuitive to calculate bandwidth, but don’t forget to calculate all the sites on your server if you only have one account calculated.

 

Consider extra bandwidth

In fact, the result of the above calculation is only an estimate, you should know that there is a difference between the theoretical calculation and the actual value. For example, if your website has 45KB per page, and there are 1000 visitors per day, each visitor looks at an average of 4 pages, so the theoretical value is about 4.5GB a month. However, these bandwidths are not enough in practical applications. You also need to consider the following aspects:

 

  • File download

If you allow visitors to download files from your website, you will need extra bandwidth for these downloads. So, you also calculate the average size of the files that visitors have downloaded from your website and the number of downloads you expect and then multiply this value by the theoretical value you calculated.

 

  • Multimedia

If you plan to put some video, music, Flash animations or other multimedia material on your website, you may need more bandwidth than just putting HTML text and images. For example, if you provide a 200MB file for a visitor to download, 22.5 downloads will require approximately 4.5GB of bandwidth.

 

  • Growing liquidity

If your website has high-quality content, you may have more and more visitors, which means that your estimated daily visitor volume, number of page visits, daily downloads, etc. will increase significantly. The required bandwidth will also increase. In short, you need to consider this to a dynamic growth process, plan for the future, and leave room for improvement on the site.

 

  • Layout change

If you are not satisfied with the current website interface, you can change its layout. However, what you need to know is that this change may change your page size, so you may use more bandwidth.

To sum up

In fact, the bandwidth is like a highway. If there is only one car on a highway, you can drive very fast. But if there are too many cars on a highway, you may be stuck in the middle or slow down because all the lines are occupied. Therefore, calculating bandwidth and planning ahead is very important.

Finally, if you want to choose a suitable hosting provider, there are many factors to consider, not just bandwidth, such as speed, price, credibility, and technical support. Here, we recommend that you choose Broodle, because we can provide the best hosting service and unlimited bandwidth for the webmasters to make your website run fast.