Calculating Bandwidth: How Much Bandwidth Do I Need?
There are close to 2 billion websites online. Every single website is backed by a website host.
The job of a hosting company is to serve your site’s files to visitors. They have limits as to how much data they can serve at once.
If you’re looking for a new host, you need to know your bandwidth needs. Get it wrong, and you could end up paying more, get your site taken offline, or get upgraded to a new hosting plan.
Are you asking yourself, “How much bandwidth do I need?”
You’ve come to the right place. Read this guide to learn how to determine your website’s bandwidth needs.
How Much Bandwidth Do I Need?
Check your site’s analytics to see how many visitors you get each month. Then check the average number of pages per visit.
Run your site through an online tool like Pingdom to calculate the average size of each page.
Multiply the monthly visitors by the average page size to get your estimated bandwidth needs.
Get the Right Hosting Plan for Your Bandwidth Needs
Now that you have an estimate, it’s time to look at website hosting options. The two main options are metered hosting and unmetered hosting.
Metered hosting has a definite limit as to how much bandwidth you can use. This is anywhere between 10GB and 20GB a month.
Unmetered bandwidth hosting doesn’t have a definite limit. Unmetered doesn’t mean unlimited, though. Each hosting company has its own set of limits, and you need to know what they are before you sign up.
These options are further categorized by the type of plan. You could get a shared hosting plan, dedicated server, or VPS hosting.
Shared hosting means that you’ll share the resources of a single server with other accounts. A dedicated server means that you’ll have your own server to yourself.
So, if you find hosting plans with unmetered dedicated servers, it means you’ll have bandwidth flexibility on your very own server.
Reduce Bandwidth Needs
You might be in a place where you’re not ready to upgrade your hosting plan. Make the most of your current plan by reducing the amount of bandwidth you need.
In order to reduce your bandwidth, you have to reduce the amount of data your site delivers to users. There are simple ways to do this.
Start by installing an image compression plugin on your site. This reduces the file size of all of the images.
A caching plugin compresses the scripts that run your site. This is another way to limit the amount of data that gets transferred.
Using a content delivery service (CDN) can reduce your server load by hosting some content on other servers.
Calculate Gbps Bandwidth
It’s important to get the right amount of bandwidth when you choose a website hosting plan. You don’t need to ask, “How much bandwidth do I need?”
You just learned a simple calculation to estimate bandwidth. You’ll be able to find the right hosting plan based on your needs.
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