The objective of developing a website is to make more and more people visit your website and check out products and services offered by you. No doubt you also want to provide excellent UX to your visitors. For accomplishing this you will require a lot of bandwidth. Must be thinking about the reasons, why is it so? Right!

Let me clear:

Any website will become an excellent platform for visitors only when it contains a proper mixture of text, images, coding, etc. All these elements form the content for the website, therefore when any visitor visits the website, it is important to provide all this content to that visitor on the respected device.

Now Bandwidth is the rate at which the content of your website gets transferred over the online network. The bandwidth usage can be seen in hosting packages. It is like similar to buying an unlimited internet pack for your smartphone, just like you get the bandwidth with the hosting plan; the only difference is that you are getting an unlimited plan for your smartphone usage. Thus bandwidth manages and controls the data of your website. One more point to be considered here is that the data of your website depends upon the content present on your website.

Let’s try to understand this concept using an example:

Assume that 5 people want to watch a video of 2 MB on Dailymotion, therefore in total it will require 10MB bandwidth for sending that video to each of them. But if Dailymotion won’t have the required bandwidth for sending that video then nobody will be able to watch it. A similar thing happens with your website also if you are not having a high level of bandwidth. 

Thus the web hosting plan which you have signed up for is unable to provide you sufficient amount of bandwidth then many visitors will receive an error at the time of accessing your website. And it might result in a decrease in traffic.

Therefore in today’s article, we are focusing on why it is important to have a high level of bandwidth for your website, how to calculate the exact bandwidth required for your website and how to choose correct web hosting package which offers the right amount of bandwidth as per the requirement of your website.

First of all, we are going to look at why is it important to have a high level of bandwidth for your website?

From our above discussion, you must have come to know that what exactly a bandwidth is and why is it required for the visitors while accessing your website.

We are giving you a few reasons behind getting a high level of bandwidth:

1. It will not be possible to send the data of your website to any visitor if you are using a lesser amount of bandwidth, this might happen when your website consists of a large number of pictures, videos or any other media files. But if the web hosting package which you have selected offers a high level of bandwidth then it will be possible for you to include a lot of such content on your website. At that time the bandwidth is not that important even though if your bandwidth reaches its limit.
2. Another reason for having a high level of bandwidth is explained here with the help of an example: Assume that you have chosen a web hosting plan which is capable of providing a bandwidth which can support only a thousand visitors at a time, then suppose unexpectedly more than thousand visitors visits your website in a particular month, at that time most of the visitors from them will not be able to access your website because the bandwidth is less as compared to the visitors. Thus during peak hours, all the visitors will get to access your website, if you have a high level of bandwidth.
3. Third and most important reason for having a high level of bandwidth is that if you are continuously updating or adding new web pages to your existing websites like blog posts or any other related web pages, then if you already have a high level of bandwidth then every visitor will be able to access all the web pages including the newly added web pages.

Overall we can say that if you have a high level of bandwidth then your content will reach out to a large number of people and it will result in powerful support to the increase in traffic to your website.

Now let’s try to understand how to calculate exact bandwidth which will be required for your website:

 If your website is in its initial stage then it is not very important to calculate the bandwidth requirement because in this case, a basic web hosting plan will be sufficient for launching your website. 

Now in case if your website is in its growing stage, then there might be a possibility that it may reach its bandwidth limit offered by your web hosting package. In such a scenario you will have to upgrade your plan or you can transfer your website to another web hosting service provider. Now here you need to know the exact requirement of bandwidth for your website. 

It is very easy to find out the requirement of your bandwidth but at the same time, you should keep one thing in mind that your web hosting service provider maintains the record of your bandwidth usage.

Also, it is important to note that the bandwidth offered by each hosting plan will ultimately reach its limit whenever a new user lands on your website.

Now let’s look at the steps involved in calculating the bandwidth of your website:

First of all, find out the number of monthly visitors who visits your website. You can easily find out this number using Google Analytics.

Then try to get the information about the number of pages that an average person checks when he is on your website using Google Analytics or WordPress Dashboard.

Also, find out the size of your web pages on your website using a tool such as Pingdom. Always check for a maximum number of pages for getting the correct average.

Once you collect all this data, just multiply them as shown below:

Visitors of your website/Month * Average of Pageviews * Average of web page size

Thus using this method you will come to know your bandwidth usage and from this, you can easily calculate your bandwidth requirement in the coming times.

It will be better if you select a hosting plan which provides minimum 50% more bandwidth than your required bandwidth because then you will be able to utilize more space for adding additional content in your website and you will also be able to manage high traffic during peak hours.

Now let’s try to understand how to choose a web hosting plan which will offer the correct amount of bandwidth for your website:

First of all, compare different web hosting plans offered by different web hosting service providers so that it will be easy for you to compare the bandwidth offered by them.

Some plans offered by web hosting providers have strict bandwidth limit mentioned in their plans. For instance, 5GB bandwidth. In this case, it is not possible for you to cross this limit.

Some plans offer flexibility for bandwidth usage. For instance, if you want to use 15GB of bandwidth, but you exceed the limit and use 20GB bandwidth, then also it will not matter too much. This type of plan permits you to use as much bandwidth as feasible for you but there is a certain higher limit. In this plan, you should always stay updated regarding the limit of your bandwidth usage offered by your web hosting provider.

Another option is to choose between shared hosting and VPS hosting plans. They offer very good options for bandwidth usage.

You all know that in Shared hosting all the resources are shared between you and other websites residing on the server like bandwidth, disk space, CPU, RAM, and so on. This hosting is best for the websites which have just been launched or the websites which doesn’t receive more traffic.

VPS or Virtual Private Server provides dedicated resources which are only for your website. It is expensive than Shared hosting but it is powerful and secure hosting which offers more bandwidth, and it is the best choice if you have more than one website with heavy traffic, also if your website is visited by more than a million visitors per month or if your website is massively loaded with content.

In such cases, the website owner requires to sign up for a VPS hosting for fulfilling his bandwidth needs.

As discussed earlier, if you are just launching the website and you are getting less than 50,000 visitors per month, then a shared hosting plan will be enough for you to meet your bandwidth requirements.

Summary:

Finally, we would like to recommend you that don’t worry about bandwidth too much. We are not saying that it is completely not an important factor, but by easily upgrading or downgrading your hosting plans you can fulfill your bandwidth requirement as your bandwidth requirements will change over the period of time.

Please let us know have you calculated your bandwidth usage in the comments section given below. Thank you for reading the blog. See you soon with another interesting blog on another interesting topic.

Vishwajit Kale

Vishwajit Kale blazed onto the digital marketing scene back in 2015 and is the digital marketing strategist of Hostripples, a company that aims to provide affordable web hosting solutions. Vishwajit is experienced in digital and content marketing along with SEO. He's fond of writing technology blogs, traveling and reading.

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