How to Essentially Measure your Bandwidth When it comes to web hosting, it can be said that bandwidth plays an important role and is the most essential aspect and the key source that one needs to look for.	Visited: 374 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Santosh Shrivatava October 28, 2009

In the web world of today, bandwidth is referred to the amount of data that is transferred through the network within a specified period of time. It is absolutely important to your website and the requirement of bandwidth totally depends on the type of your website, your business goals and the kind of visitors you will have. Although companies recommend of having high bandwidth, this is not the absolute requirement for all. A simple calculation can help you to have an overall estimate of the required bandwidth size of the website. It is the average size of the web pages X number of pages = required bandwidth.

The easiest process to manage your bandwidth and space is to keep your site as simple as possible. Mostly the bandwidth ranges from 3 GB for personal sites to 200 GB in case of large business systems. High bandwidth is required in cases where the sites are accessed for huge data transfers and are not for the purpose of simply viewing or gathering information. Depending on the content and quality of each web page you can decide from the array of options as to which plan suits your website the best. These varied packages allow complete freedom to the webmasters to design the site and create highly interactive media without having to compromise on the space usage. So, how should you determine your bandwidth needs?

Web traffic
Anticipating your web traffic is the best way to determine your bandwidth needs. Your business website will obviously need more bandwidth than your personal site. It is difficult to calculate the exact amount of bandwidth you may need but finding a web hosting company that offers packages somewhere from 300 to 1000GB per month along with some statistic tools will enable you to gauge the monthly traffic to your site.

Size of your pages
It is better to keep your website simple and web pages that are generated using CMS frameworks have size around 100 – 150KB each. Depending on the number of web pages you can decide on the requirement of your bandwidth.

Space for images
The requirement of bandwidth depends on the number of images you want to store on the site. So on an average, a picture of 1024 x 788 resolutions would need around 100 – 150 KB. For 6 -7 pictures you will need 1 MB of hosting space and as the number increases you have to bear the expenses.

Space for audio and video
It is not possible for small or medium websites to host massive content like audio or video on their sites directly. The hosting space required for the viewing of such media files is normally beyond the range of common hosting packages. Most CMSs support some kind of plug-in that allows accessing the media files from other sites and showing them directly on your website.

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