Importance of Bandwidth Usage of Your Website

By Aslam Saah

Need, Compute and Choose!

We all have recharged our phones right? Either we go for a specific plan or just opt for unlimited data so that we can send and receive data without any interruption.

Herein comes the role of ‘Bandwidth’. In simple terms, the volume of data that can traverse from one source to another within a specified time span is referred to as Bandwidth.

Importance of Bandwidth

It’s a well-known fact that a website is a vivid collection of graphics, images, texts, audio n video. When a visitor accesses your website, the entire web content needs to be transferred onto the user’s browser. More the number of users, more the load or traffic for that particular website. In such a case websites with low bandwidth can cut out a sorry figure if the content is not timely displayed to their users. Thus degrading the performance and reputation of the website. So an adequate amount of bandwidth can ensure the proper and smooth running of your website.

SeekaHost simplifies in a nutshell 3 important facts related to your Bandwidth (Need, Compute and Choose!)

1. Need for high-level bandwidth

As signified earlier, more the bandwidth, more will be the data transfer. In order to tactfully handle and transfer your valuable website content across numerous people, one ought to choose a high range of bandwidth. Following are the thumbs up you’ll achieve:

• Entire web content can be accessed
• Prevention against website crash
• Addition of more media content

2. Computing actual bandwidth required

Websites that are startups, having limited content, will perform sufficiently well with the bandwidth provided by a simple hosting plan. Nevertheless, heavy traffic attracting websites need to watch over their hosting plans and be aware of computing the required bandwidth. Here we show you how to compute the bandwidth you require:

• Identify the number of visitors per month (via WordPress/Google Analytics)
• Find average page-views by the user ( via WordPress dashboard/Google Analytics)
• Compute average webpage size of your website (via Pingdom tool)

Now, perform the final calculation: Website visitors/month x Average page-views x Average Web page-size

Tough Ugh! Let’s take an example, consider:

Website visitors/month – 5000, Average page-views – 4, Average Web page-size – 5 MB

So, 5000 x 4 x 5 = 100000 MB this means 100 GB per month

Once you have your bandwidth computed, you have a tentative idea about your needs. This makes the next step in choosing the hosting plan much clearer.

3. Choosing the best hosting plan for the desired bandwidth

After having the computed bandwidth in your mind, opting out for a hosting plan that provides you more than your existing requirement will lay down additional space in case of some peak events. There are many web hosting plans offering different bandwidth.

Basically, there is 2 kind of bandwidth offered in the hosting plans:

• Metered Bandwidth: which offers bounded or fixed bandwidth range. You don’t get even an additional byte than what is being specified.
• Unmetered Bandwidth: this is a variable bandwidth type. You do get additional bytes (up to a certain limit) even if you exceed your bandwidth limit.

Though one can easily get the above discussed bandwidth in any of the hosting plans, one must simultaneously lookout for whether to go for shared hosting or VPS.

All said and done, even if you find you need a higher bandwidth or lower it, there is always an option SeekaHost which will guide you and recommend the best possible solution.