Determining how much bandwidth is necessary for any given hosting situation is challenging. We usually don’t track our personal usage close enough to have a clear idea of our needs. And while the amount of bandwidth alloted for a given hosting plan may seem very generous, overage costs are mostly quite high with underestimated bandwidth needs. Here are some guidelines to help you estimate how much bandwidth you may need for any given hosting setup.
First, think of your hosting needs. Specifically, what servers are you planning on hosting, and how many users do you anticipate? If hosting servers with potentially large bandwidth needs, what content do you plan to supply? The required amount of bandwidth differs considerably depending on these factors. For example, even personal sites can use a lot of bandwidth if they host podcasts, photos or other large files that can quickly become popular.
One logical method for calculating bandwidth necessary for hosting a website involves the following formula: Site visitors X page views X average page size X days per month X safety factor. This can help determine if any given hosting plan will meet your needs. It can also help evaluate whether an existing provider can continue to meet visitor demand as popularity grows and, should it not do so indefinitely, to determine when action is necessary and what
steps you should take.
The safety factor in the above equation is crucial to take into account, and should generally fall between 1.5 and 2.0. Basically, this number guarantees bandwidth flexibility you may need when sudden spikes in popularity occur. It may seem tempting to do away with this variable and cut costs, still an unavailable site can spell the difference between a successful venture and a failed one. What is more, extra fees for using too much bandwidth can easily reduce the savings you made by cutting the costs on bandwidth.
There are a number of ways to use bandwidth more efficiently should the need arise. There’s much to be saved by offloading some hosting to specialized systems, not as flexible as standard web hosts, yet particularly optimized for specific content or for other large files. Podcasts, music, photos and other forms of media can be hosted on third-party sites optimized for such needs, and can be linked to from your main site. Also, generic solutions such as Amazon’s Simple Storage System (S3) enable efficient and cheap hosting of large amounts of data.
Nowaday many web hosts set up very high limits of bandwidth or even none at all. Still, it’s not good to give up quality solutions only bcause they offer less bandwidth than others do. Bandwidth is one of many factors that make up a quality host, but it can easily become inflated by web hosts who offer high limits being certain that most users will come nowhere near them. Solutions of this kind quickly attract customers, but problems may soon appear if servers are over-provisioned and bandwidth becomes scarce. Being aware of your average bandwidth needs and the options available in case you get close to your limit, you can easily avoid this trap and choose the best host for you. Also if you are planning to upload big amount of multimedia files it might be a good idea to choose a hosting company that provides vps service for you to easily upgrade.
