Have you decided to launch your own website? It’s time to choose among the best ghost hosts. But before that, you must answer a few questions:
- What is a bandwidth?
- How much bandwidth do I need?
- What does not enough bandwidth mean?
This is the minimum list of questions, without answers to which you can get a fine if the tariff is incorrectly selected. Some even face blocking and selling the site! Before we start talking about the basic concepts, let’s mention cheap shared hosting. This is a great solution for sites that don’t need huge bandwidth. This way, you can save your budget without risking site performance.
How to assess the needs of your site and choose a hosting plan?
Let’s start with why do this at all. The site will not work without hosting. You need hosting, since you have decided to launch a website. But there are many options. You don’t need to buy the most expensive data plan for your website to work great. Let’s deal with this concept.
Before choosing a hosting, you still have to find out what disk space is. This is necessary in order to correctly calculate the required bandwidth. This will save your budget and your website pages will load quickly. The speed of the platform will not depend on the number of visitors. All this will only work if the calculations turn out to be correct.
A few words about disk space
This concept reflects the amount of data that will fit on a web server. The more pages and information on your resource, the more space you need. Information can be submitted in any form:
- HTML (text);
- Images;
- Their combinations.
Please note that standard text documents take up significantly less space than photos and pictures. Videos take up the most disk space on the server. Many sites even prefer not to upload videos to the server to increase speed. They use cache technology to send a copy of the video pages to user requests. This is done in order to reduce the page weight. For the fastest loading, each page should be no heavier than 50-60 KB. Even pictures and photographs need to fit into this figure.
What is bandwidth in web hosting in simple terms?
At times, website owners get higher than usual web hosting bills from hosting providers. The hoster attributes this to exceeding monthly “bandwidth usage” limits and suggests reducing the size of the website.
Bandwidth is the amount of information that can be transferred to the server from the site and back per month. This amount depends on the tariff plan. All traffic must be included in the data stream:
- Views;
- Downloading files;
- Requests for technical support;
- Transitions between pages;
- Making purchases in online stores.
With a page size of 50KB, 40,000 visitors per month, and 5 pages per visitor, your site will need about 10GB of bandwidth per month. This means that your site is visited by over 1000 people every day. In fact, even large online stores cannot always boast of such indicators. Therefore, consider whether you need to pay for such corridors for information.
How can I check the bandwidth usage?
You will have to analyze the statistics of your site. If you are just launching a website, it is better to choose a lower rate. If the flow of visitors is more than planned, the hoster will offer you to choose a more expensive connection.
Calculation of the required bandwidth
The calculation is easy to do without special formulas or software:
- Look at site statistics for the month.
- If the site is new, take the statistics of a site similar to yours as a basis.
- Be sure to choose a site with the same subject matter as yours from your region.
- Next, you need to multiply the page size of the site by the number of guests per month.
- If the pages have different weights and are very different, calculate the average.
- The resulting value must be multiplied by the number of pages viewed by one visitor.
You will get a very average figure. This is because pages can vary greatly in weight. Video content weighs much more than a blog page. But visitors look at video and photo pages more often than they read company news.
Is there unlimited bandwidth?
No, this is a mythical concept. Usually, service providers refer to unlimited very high bandwidth. If you buy an expensive data plan, you get a lot of server disk space. You will also have access to high bandwidth. It will be so large that during normal operation of the site, you will never exhaust the system’s capabilities. If there is a sharp increase in incoming traffic, you will simply be offered to upgrade to an even more expensive tariff plan.