When signing up for a web hosting account, or if you are in the position of suddenly finding yourself with a ton of new traffic, there comes a time when you’ll need to understand just how much bandwidth you are using, and subsequently how much you’ll need going forward. While this is not always extremely accessible information, there are ways you can estimate your bandwidth needs, and come up with a plan for your near future. Let’s look at how you can measure your bandwidth.
If you happen to have a reseller account, or have access to the Web Host Manager (WHM) this information is readily available for each of your domains in the WHM panel. You have the ability there to change limits on your bandwidth by adjusting the quotas within the hosting package that was chosen to host that particular domain.
If that’s not the case, there is a simple formula you can use, that will give you a loose estimate. You take the average size of your web pages multiplied by the number of pages. This will give you the bandwidth required for your site.
Now, this is by no means an entirely accurate number, but can be used to give you a ballpark idea. You can also contact your hosting company for this information, but unless you’ve exceeded your bandwidth, this request will be low on the totem pole.
Items Affecting Bandwidth Usage
There are a number of practices that affect the amount of bandwidth your site uses. Let’s look at some of them, as they are useful to keep in mind when planning your sites and their needs.
Web Traffic – While this is obviously not something we want to limit, it is a factor to consider when determining how much bandwidth is necessary for your site. This is a difficult number to come up with, as a number of factors within it make it more complicated, such as the time spent on the pages, how many pages visited, how fast they load, and more. You may want to start with a web hosting company that has at least 300 GB worth of space, and go from there.
Page Size – Most web pages are increasing from the size they used to be, mostly as a result of all the wonderful multimedia we can now employ on our sites. The benchmark is around 100-150 MB, but is rising.
Images – An image measuring 1024 x 788 would need around 100–150 KB of space, and it probably isn’t your only one. Proceed accordingly.
Videos & Audios – Both of these mediums use a boatload of bandwidth, so you need to be aware. Embed when you can, rather than host.
Files & Downloads – These can chew up bandwidth fast, especially of you have a popular ebook or report or software download.
While it’s usually not possible to get a 100% accurate number, these guidelines will help you to plan your site’s bandwidth needs, and avoid getting into bandwidth debt!
