When you plan to start a website and choose the best web hosting companies, you have to determine and allocate the amount of bandwidth you need for your website. So in this article, you will learn what is bandwidth usage? How much do you need it?

What is Bandwidth Usage?

In computer networking terms, bandwidth is the amount of data carried by the network connection. While website hosting bandwidth refers to the rate at which data can be transferred between a website and computers connected to it within a particular time. Usually, it is the calculated monthly in hosting packages by many web hosting providers, for example, 1GB bandwidth per month, or 10GB bandwidth per month.

In simple terms, bandwidth defines the amount of traffic, and the amount of data that can transfer between your website, users, and the Internet. Web hosting companies offer a maximum level of bandwidth for their tiers of hosting plans.

What’s the Difference between bandwidth and Traffic?

On a simple note, Bandwidth is like the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is like the number of vehicles on the highway. Traffic is only the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. Bandwidth is the number of bits can be transferred on network connections within a given period.

Let’s take it by an example if you have 1000 MB website bandwidth and you host a 300MB video on the website for visitors to download. Each download will create 300 MB traffic between the web server and the local computer. Three downloads will create 900 MB traffic, four downloads will create 1200 MB traffic. If all the four downloads happen at the same time, all the bandwidth will be occupied. In such a case, someone will have to wait. Your web hosting company will cycle through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time so each person’s file transfer can take place, but the transfer for everyone downloading the video will be slower. The more traffic at the same time, the slower the transfers would be.

How to Calculate Bandwidth We Need?

It is one of the most important factors you should keep in mind before signing up for a new web hosting plan. Bandwidth is usually the main concern for big business websites.

Here’s a simple calculation method:

The bandwidth needed = Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors x Number of days in a month (31) x Redundant Factor

If you plan to enable people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be:

The bandwidth needed =(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) + (Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Normally, website hosting providers or plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why you need to take daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

Average Daily Visitors: The total number of monthly visitors/30.

 Average Page Size: The average size of your web page.

 Average Page Views: The average page viewed per visitors.

 Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8.

Average Daily Visitors – The average number of traffic you expect to visit your website each day.

 Average Page Views – The average number of web pages you expect a visitor to view each visit.

 Average Page Size – The average size of your web pages in KB.

 Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that your estimate is off by 50%.

How to Reduce bandwidth Usage of Your Website?

In case you are wondering if there is any way to decrease the bandwidth usage. Luckily, the answer is yes. If you’d like to reduce the website bandwidth usage, you can design a website with CSS and clean code; this will shed down the web page size. Also try to avoid or reduce the usage of heavy images, particularly downloads and videos on your website. This will also help you to speed up your website.