Calculating Bandwidth

Most web hosting companies offer a variety of hosting plans with all sorts of bandwidth limits. To put simply, bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transfered between your hosting server and your visitors browsers. Depending on your web site's traffic, you could need a little or a lot of bandwidth.

Most web hosting companies offer bandwidth in the Gigabytes (GB). You may think this is more than enough to host your web site, but if your site becomes popular,  your bandwidth can get used up rather quickly.

Time For Some Math

The actual formula for calculating bandwidth is:

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31

Here is the breakdown:

• Average Daily Visitors - The amount of visitors that access your site.
• Average Page Views - The amount of web pages one visitor accesses. If you have 100 pages, one visitor may view one page, While another visitor may view 20.
• Average Page Size - The average size of your pages. If you are sending a lot of images and other media files, this will use up more bandwidth. Always try and refrain from using large, bulky images. You can always strip your web pages of any whitespace as well, since that increases the size of the file.
• 31 - Since we are calculating bandwidth on a monthly basis, we need to take all of our daily numbers and multiply them by 31 to give us the monthly calculation.

Optional: Once you have that number, you can multiply it again with 1.5 to give you some extra wiggle room. Using 1.5 assumes your numbers are off by 50%. Using 2 will give you double your needed bandwidth.

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