What is Bandwidth in Web Hosting

posted by Farhan on December 5, 2019

Bandwidth in computer networking relates to the data rate provided by a network connection or interface. Many hosting companies offer a range of bandwidth choices in their plans from 1 G to 100 G, some hosting companies also offer unlimited bandwidth. So what exactly is the bandwidth of web hosting?

The hosting bandwidth of the website defines the frequency at which information can be transmitted within a specific time between a website and computers linked to it. It is usually calculated quarterly by many website providers in hosting packages e.g. 1 g bandwidth per month, or 5 g bandwidth per month.

Bandwidth represents the capacity of the connection. However, the overall performance of a website also depends on many other factors as well.

What’s the difference between bandwidth and traffic?

Traffic vs web hosting bandwidth just like cars vs highways. Bandwidth is the number of highway lanes and the number of cars on the highway is the amount of traffic. Traffic is simply the number of bits on network connections that are transmitted. Bandwidth is the number of bits that can be transmitted over a given period of time to network connections.

If you have 100 MB bandwidth on the website and you can host a 40 MB video on the web. Each download will create 40MB traffic between the web server and the local computer. Two downloads create traffic of 80 MB, and three downloads create traffic of 120 MB. If all three downloads take place simultaneously, all the bandwidth will be used up. In such a case, someone will have to wait. Your hosting company will loop through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time to allow the transfer of each person’s file, but the transfer will be slower for everybody downloading the video. The more visitors at the same time, the slower the transfers would be.

How much bandwidth do you need?

This is the question you should ask yourself before signing up for a new web hosting account. With popular business websites, bandwidth is often the main concern.

How to estimate and calculate website bandwidth? here’s a simple calculation method:

The bandwidth needed = Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors x Number of days in a month (31) x Redundant Factor

If you want people to download files from your site, the calculation of your bandwidth should be:

The bandwidth needed =(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) + (Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Website hosting businesses or plans usually offer Gigabyte (GB) bandwidth per month. This is why you need to takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

  • Average daily visitors: total monthly visitors/30.
  • Average page size: the web page’s average size.
  • Average page views: the page visited per user on average.
  • Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8.
  • Average Daily Visitors – The average number of people you expect to visit your website each day.
  • Average Page Views – The average number of web pages you expect a visitor to view each visit.
  • Average Page Size – The average KB size of your web pages.
  • Redundant Factor – A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8. It would be better to use 1.5, which means that your calculation is 50% off.

Check Bandwidth from traffic stats report

A quick way to know how much bandwidth your website needs is to test your previous host’s traffic statistics. If you have a current host website and you want to move the website to a new host, you can refer to the analytics traffic report with the last hosting company. Most web hosting service companies can provide reporting services to website statistics.

Usually, if you have a brand new same website without much content yet, you can go for shared hosting, as normally you will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth With the exception of investing a lot of money on advertising or hiring a professional marketing team each month as soon as the new page is launched. It’s the same for most personal web hosting or websites for small businesses. Always go with a low bandwidth plan at the initial stage if you can anticipate little traffic to your page. After all, most web hosting companies will offer you upgrade options for more bandwidth if you need it.

How can I reduce bandwidth usage?

Is there any way to reduce the use of bandwidth? Yes. If you want to reduce the bandwidth of the website, you can build a website with CSS and clean coding, this can reduce the size of the web page.

Does any web hosting offer an affordable hosting package with unlimited bandwidth?

Yes, it is true. Some web hosting companies can offer unlimited bandwidth on their web servers, such as Bluehost, GreenGeeks, Justhost, IX Web Hosting, Hostgator, Arvixe, etc. Bluehost and Hostgator are leading Linux web hosting service providers, Justhost is the most popular budget hosting service provider and Arvixe is a fully-featured web hosting who provides both Linux and Windows hosting packages with best-hosting features.

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