How Much Bandwidth Does my Website Need?

Bandwidth (or traffic allowance, transfer allowance) refers to how much data that can be downloaded from your hosting space. Depending how many visitors you get this can be an important factor when choosing a web hosting company.

Unlike disk space, which can be managed by optimising content and deleting unnecessary files, bandwidth requires more thought and planning. You can calculate the amount you need so you don't pay for more than you need (most people over estimate their requirements). If you do get towards your limit we never stop your website or throttle it but work with all our customers to find a suitable solution, which often involves optimising their website.

Another consideration is the quality of the bandwidth. There is no point in having unlimited bandwidth if it is slow, poor quality and unreliable. That is why we only use multiple Tier 1 transit providers to give you the network performance you would want.

How do I find out how much bandwidth my website needs?

To calculate how much bandwidth your website uses you need the following figures:

  • Daily Visitors - You can get this from your analytics data. If you have not got this then sign up with Google Analytics which adds a simple bit of code to the pages you wish to track.
  • Average Page Visits - Again from your analytics data. You will be able to see how many pages each visitor goes to.
  • Average Page Size - The average page size of your website is measured in kilobytes (kb). If you don't know this there are various tools that can help you like Pingdom Website Speed Test. Take an average of your 5 most popular pages.

Now you have the data you need to estimate how much bandwidth your website uses. Multiple the 3 values together. For example if you have 200 visitors a day, each visiting 10 pages with an average page size of 500kb you would download 1,000,000kb or 1GB so over a month you would need 30GB of bandwidth.

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