ProvidentHost Blog

There are many hosting options out there. Most of the time, one company is also offering several plans where the bandwidths are different one and another. Normally, the more the better. However, if you are in a very tight budget, you might want to know exactly how much bandwidth is enough for your website.

There is no easy way to future predict a bandwidth usage. Most search engines, like Google or Yahoo, use robots to crawl your website and these robots use different bandwidth than human visitors. Website that use database might use different bandwidth than website with no database. However, let’s do a simple counting to try to future predict the usage of your bandwidth.

To predict your bandwidth, you need to build the website first. You then pay attention to the size of each and every file. (html, image, flash, etc) If you haven’t built your website, the prediction will become less accurate as you will also need to predict how much disk space is taken by each and every file. If you haven’t built your website it means that you are building prediction based on prediction, not based on fact.

OK, let’s get dirty.

Let’s assume your main page is an html file with a size of 5Kb. In that page you put 2 images, the header banner is 25Kb and the footer graphic is 10Kb. You also put a flash animation in the center of the page with 10Kb in size. That means in total, your main page takes 50Kb. So, what this means?

That means when a human visitor visit your main page, that person takes 50Kb bandwidths. Most browsers will have a cache. When the person visits your site, the browser downloads the contents, all 50Kb of them, to the person hard drive. If the person refreshes the browser, mostly, the content will be taken from the cache. This means that person does not take any bandwidth for this action. Nevertheless, if the cache session is over and the person refreshes the browser, that person is taking another 50Kb bandwidths from you. Thus, from that one person, you need to prepare 100Kb. If tomorrow the same person visits your website again, most likely the cache session is over and that person will take another 50Kb bandwidths from you.

Simply put, if you are expecting 250 people visit and refresh your main page in a day, you need to prepare: 250 people x 30 days x 50Kb = 375,000Kb or 375Mb bandwidth. Pay attention though that the counting above only includes one webpage of your website. If you expect each visitor to visit 5 web pages of your website, you need to prepare: 375Mb x 5 web pages = 1,875Mb or 1.875 GB, which is almost 2 GB bandwidth. Also, that bandwidth counting is only from human visitors, you also need to put search engines robots into counting. You could perhaps expect one robot to visit your page once a month or once a month or even once a day if your website is that good. That means the 1.875 GB could easily be rounded to 2 GB while taking search engine robots into consideration.

You also need to pay attention that the example above is only assuming that you will have 250 visitors a day or 7,500 visitors a month. For a website to be counted as a normally working website, most people will agree that 100,000 visitors a month is the minimum. With that number, you need to prepare: 100,000 visitors x 50Kb x 5 pages = 25,000,000 Kb or 25 GB bandwidths each month. If your website is an advanced website with lots of graphics and flash animations to make the website beautiful, you may take 200Kb for each webpage. Thus making the number 4 times bigger or 100 GB bandwidths needed each and every month. If you are successful, you could have 500,000 visitors or more each month and that will make the number even bigger.

In summary, the bandwidth you need to run your website seamlessly could be counted beforehand. Several main factors you need to take into consideration while counting bandwidth are: number of visitors each month, the total size of your pages, and how many pages you have on your website. You also need to prepare for search engines robots visit and several additional bandwidths that are taken when you use database such as MySQL.

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