When looking into website hosting, one of the most essential characteristics to verify is the amount of bandwidth offered. The bandwidth is the amount of traffic allowed to your website from the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth that a company can offer is based on the hosting companies’ network connections. This includes the internal network connections to their data centres (where the hosting is located) and the external connections to the internet.

If the bandwidth provided by the hosting is exceeded, this will require purchase of additional bandwidth at a higher price (usually per GB exceeded). If only a low percentage of the bandwidth is used, this is resulting in paying for a service that is not being optimised. When looking into hosting bandwidth, it is important to estimate the amount of data transfer that would be required for the present and take into account estimated growth in the near future.

For example, if a websites home page is 30KB in size (this will include scripts and images), it would require each visitor of the home page to receive 30KB of data to their browser in order to view the website. If this website home page received 1000 views in a month, the amount of bandwidth required would be:

30KB x 100 = 30,000KB = 0.02861GB per month

The above calculation, is estimating that a website’s visitor would only view the homepage which is highly unlikely. A more realistic estimate would be to take an average of the amount of daily page views and multiply by the average size of the webpage and multiple by the amount of days in a month:

(Avg number of visitors X Avg page views X Avg page size) X 31 = Avg bandwidth per month

For example, a website receiving 200 daily visitors, viewing an average of 6 pages and an average page size of 30KB would require bandwidth of:

(200 x 6 x 30) x 31 = 1,116,000KB = 1.0643GB per month

This is a basic example of how the bandwidth for a site should be calculated. If a website provides large images, complex scripting methods, video or music on a website the average page size will be significantly increased.