Web Hosting Features: What is Bandwidth and Why Should I Care?

So, you want to build a website and you're looking for web hosting. That's great, but what are all those features being offered? For instance, Bandwidth? What's that?

Bandwidth is also called data transfer or traffic. So if you see any of these terms associated with a gigabyte or gb or GB value then that feature is actually bandwidth.


Simply put, bandwidth is the number of gigabytes of data that your website is allocated to transfer from the web hosting server to your users in one month. This number is not an absolute, it's just the number of gigabytes of bandwidth you pay for in the monthly price of your hosting plan.

If your users are so many or your website is so busy that you go over your bandwidth allotment in a month, then you are charged extra for each gigabyte over the amount included in your hosting plan.

The cost per extra gigabyte for the overage is usually around $0.50, depending upon your hosting company. If you are concerned about running over your bandwidth allotment, then you should check with your hosting company about the actual cost for each extra gigabyte.

Bandwidth is now cheaper than ever before, so it would be foolish not to get the most bandwidth you think you'll need right off the bat. Depending upon the hosting company, you may find that for a couple of dollars more each month you can get as much as 4 or 5 times the bandwidth of the cheaper hosting plan!

Generally, bandwidth is the amount of information transmitted to and from your website by your visitors.

The following are the factors considered in your traffic usage or bandwidth:

1. The amount of traffic you receive (hits to your website)
2. The size of your site
3. The types of files offered on your site
4. How much data you upload to your website.

A hit is more than a visit. Every file, picture or any other reference that's made to your hosting server when your web page is loaded is a hit. Each hit consists of a number of bytes of information.

For example, let's say your website is 1 megabyte (MB) including web pages and images. If 100 people visited your website and viewed all the pages, the traffic generated would be approximately 100 MB.

A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes (1 million bytes) and a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes (1 trillion bytes). So that makes a megabyte 1/1,000 of a gigabyte. In the example above, 100 MB of data transfer would be 1/10 of a gigabyte.

So, if your website traffic consisted of 100 MB each day, your usage for a 30-day month would be 3,000 MB or 3 GB per month. In this case, you would want a hosting plan that provided at least 3 GB of bandwidth per month.

But that's not ideal. What if you have a burst of traffic during a month (lucky you!) or what if your daily traffic grows beyond 100 visitors per day (luckier you!)? You could easily exceed your monthly bandwidth. If this happened rarely, then no big deal, just pay the few dollars for the bandwidth you used over your monthly allotment.

But, if your site is that successful, it would probably be better to move to an upgraded hosting plan. You'll save money this way and won't be nagged by your hosting company to upgrade your hosting plan every month.

Let's consider an example: If your visitors increased by 50% you would have 150 MB of traffic each day for a total of 4.5 GB of monthly traffic. You would pay about $1.00 for the extra bandwidth.

You would probably find that an upgrade to a better hosting plan would cost you an extra couple of dollars each month, but you would triple or quadruple your bandwidth. That's a better bargain and allows your successful website to grow without further fees or upgrades.

And don't forget, even inexpensive hosting plans allow you to host multiple websites on one hosting plan. This is a real money-saver, but you'll need lots of bandwidth to handle more than one website on a hosting plan. Fortunately, as you've seen in the examples above, you don't pay double to double or even triple your bandwidth.

Basically, the rule of thumb is: Total the size of all your frequently visited website pages, images, external CSS and Javascript files, any downloadable files, MP3s, or video and you will have the expected bandwidth per visit to your website.

Then check your server logs or site analytics data to determine the number of visitors per month. Multiply the two numbers and you should have an idea of your usual monthly website traffic. Next add in the size of uploads you may make. For example, when you change a page or redesign your site, you will upload new web pages to your site. These uploads cut into your bandwidth too. Double the grand total to allow room for growth and you have a pretty good idea of your bandwidth needs for that website.

Next, allow some bandwidth for the addition of new websites on the same hosting plan. Add everything together and purchase a hosting plan that meets your current needs and has room for you to grow as your business succeeds.



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