I think that many newbies just do have this problem all the time. The one and basic thing and problem at the same time they come across at their beginning is the question of how much bandwidth do I need for my web site? Many times they think that they need tons of GB and what they really needs is just a bunch of megabytes, or a bunch of gigabytes. How much is a “bunch of”? How do I find out how much bandwidth do I need? Are there any tables to find out what suits my needs?

I can answer this last question with one big NO. No, there are no tables and you can not know the exact number [ok, you might...]. You might find out an approximate number of the bandwidth you will need, but there is no real way to find out how much BW you will need. But that’s OK as the life should not always be set in rigid limits.

How to find out how much bandwidth do I need?

I will use three different scenarios and hopefully your site will fit in one of them. Here they are in a list [I will cover them all below in sections ]:

• The WordPress/Joomla/Drupal powered personal sites
• Web forums & sites
• Personal basic HTML/CSS sites

The basic formula behind all of these is the same:

• number of visitors per day/hits every visitors makes on your web page = X  [measured in hits]                       [e.g. 100 visitors and every one looks at 10 pages/articles = 1000 hits]
• number of days in a month = Y  [28/29, 30/31 - depends on the month]
• the size of one web page = Z       [measures in kilobytes - e.g. 1 page = 350kB]

BANDWIDTH = X x Y x Z

e.g. A website with 1000 daily visitors and every visitor looks at 7 pages. Each page is 400kB and the number of days in a month is 30.

BANDWIDTH = 7000 x 400 x 30 = 28 000 000 kB = 28 000MB = 28GB

Thus you would need 28GB and more of bandwidth to cover this.

CMS powered personal sites

There are so many CMS’s out today that it would be really hard to guess or give you any recommendation on how much BW you will need. Basically it depends on the size of the web site and most of all the the type of data you are hosting there. A small blog does not need terabytes of data! You could be fine with 10GB and I think it would be too much.

Web forums

If you are planing to create a powerful community and use a forum system to achieve this you might find out that forums are really resource thirsty. They need lot of bandwidth once they pass a certain number of registered users who use the forum on a daily basis. Thus I would recommend to look for a bigger bandwidth limit than with a basic blog.

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Personal, basic HTML sites

Are you trying to just make a personal web page and host a couple of photos and files there? If you are no trying to host entire movies or files with gigabytes of data that you might not need more than a couple of gigabytes of bandwidth per month…

What to know before the calculations?

• People tend to think they need lots of bandwidth with small blogs, but you really don’t need that much at the beginning of your journey
• If you are new to web hosting and you do know think your web site could see millions of hist per day you do not need to think you need terabytes of BW. Start with a shared hosting where the company tells you exactly how much resources you are allowed to use
• Unlimited is not a very secure way to go .It’s very good to know what exactly you are allowed to use! Else you ight get into trouble, but there are also good hosts who just dont’ shut you down for excessive bandwidth usage.
• Unmetered and unlimited is not always the same, but many times it’s equal. Unmetered could mean your account is not measured. Unlimited sounds like there are no limits. Still, people at forums tend to tell it’s not very safe to go with unlimited… I don’t know – it’s up to you!

Have a nice day and don’t hesitate to ask me questions related to this topic The comments area is always prepared

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