When you plan to buy hosting services, first, you need to know how much hosting space you’ll keep in your web hosting plan. You may hear the term bandwidth when purchasing your web hosting services.
Do you know what it is and how to calculate it?
If not!
Don’t panic!
Here in this blog post, we’ll discuss it in detail. So let’s move with me:
You may encounter different hosting plans when you start your mark search to buy web hosting services to host your website or blog. All are different based on performance quality, bandwidth, and hosting cost.
Bandwidth is one of the significant hosting features that you should consider when purchasing a hosting space. Before debating on this hosting feature, you need to know what is bandwidth? Most people interlink bandwidth with the website speed, which needs to be corrected. Let me explain further.
[lwptoc numeration=”none”]
What Is Web Hosting Bandwidth?
Bandwidth refers to the amount of data transmitted in a given period. For example, website data is typically measured in bits/megabits per second.
When you upload images, pages, and graphics files to your hosting provider, it stores them on its servers so your users can access them when they want.
When your website users request these files, bandwidth measures how fast specific files can be transferred over the internet by your site visitor.
Bandwidth is measured in bits/megabits per second. So the more Mbps your web hosting provider offers, the more files you can transfer over the internet.
Why Bandwidth is important?
Bandwidth is essential to hosting a website smoothly. However, the bandwidth you need depends entirely on your website niche, traffic, and content.
You only need a little bandwidth if you’re running a low-traffic website with limited data files, content, or images. However, if your website is filled with multimedia and graphics, you’ll need more bandwidth to run your website without facing downtime.
Bandwidth is important in determining how fast your web page loads on your browser. This is one of the main reasons to consider when choosing a hosting plan for your website.
Typically, a website with heavy images and long videos will need a higher bandwidth of 20 Mbps. In contrast, websites that are only based on blogs or content will need less bandwidth.
For smooth online performance, you need rocket-fast server speed to quickly upload your website data or files. Higher bandwidth will effectively improve the quality and your website user experience.
How to Check Bandwidth Usage of a Website?
You don’t require technical knowledge to check or calculate your website bandwidth. You need to determine your website’s expected monthly visitors and the average size of your website page.
Since your website visitor might also get interested in visiting other pages of your website, so you have to consider this factor while calculating your website bandwidth needs.
To calculate a rough estimate of bandwidth needs, the following information will need to be collected from your website’s management portal:
- Average page size
- Expected monthly visitors
- Average daily visitors
- Page views
- Redundancy
For your comprehensive understanding of calculation, bandwidth let me clear it up;
Let’s assume!
Your website’s expecting visitors. You’ll receive 20,000 per month and an average website page size of 40KB. You expect each visitor to visit an average of 3 pages on your website.
Before selecting a web hosting plan, check or calculate how much bandwidth you need to run your website.
If you need to know the average page size of your website, you can also utilize the Pingdom tool to know the load time of your website. You can also use it to find the average page size of your website as well.
On the safest side, you have to consider extra space to manage your website. At least 50% of this space should be allocated to your website’s traffic. Therefore, make sure you calculate every possible side while calculating your website expected bandwidth requirements.
What is Unlimited Bandwidth?
You may have heard that local and international web hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth. Although these hosting companies claim to offer unlimited bandwidth, they are not.
There is no free lunch in this world!
So how you’ll expect web hosting companies offer you unlimited bandwidth? It’s just a marketing tactic to get potential customers’ attention. In reality, there is no such thing in the tag name of unlimited bandwidth.
Web hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth plans to attract more users, but most companies offer an average bandwidth as their unlimited bandwidth plan.
With unlimited bandwidth, hosting provider psychology satisfies their customers. By comparing the amount of your required bandwidth, you can reach the amount offered in the unlimited bandwidth plan.
How Much Bandwidth Do I Need?
The bandwidth you require to host your website depends upon your website niche, data or file size/collections/images, and the number of visitors. If you know these details, you’ll find the right web hosting plan with the proper bandwidth for your website.
If your site is new or has a limited number of content/visitors, you don’t need a high amount of bandwidth. In this context, the Shared hosting plan might be an excellent option.
On the contrary, if your site already has high traffic and carries heavy graphics, images, video, audio, downloadable content, and visitors, then you need more bandwidth.
The easiest way to know how much bandwidth your website requires, you can log into your host account and view your website traffic reports in your cPanel.
So, even if you start your hosting journey with a shared hosting plan, and it’ll shut down your website instead of losing your customers upgrade your hosting plan to accommodate your site visitors to experience the best user experience.
What Happens When You Have Low Bandwidth?
Low bandwidth means slow network performance, and it generally refers to bandwidth issues by attempts to process large amounts of data over an extended period. There are a few common activities that can cause low bandwidth problems, such as:
- Streaming videos
- Large file transfers between computers
- A constant stream of data
- Downloading files from the internet
All of the above can cause low bandwidth issues in a network. Low bandwidth issues will negatively impact your regular and potential customers. Due to low bandwidth, you may lose your potential customer forever.
What Happens if I Exceed Bandwidth?
The term bandwidth limit exceeded means the amount of bandwidth that fixes in your hosting plan has been reached. Bandwidth is consumed when data is retrieved from the server and delivered to the end user and when the end user uploads data to the web server.
If the amount of bandwidth exceeds the limit offered in the hosting plan, the browser will return a ‘bandwidth limit exceeded error.‘
To avoid the tension of bandwidth exceeding the limit- offers an unlimited web hosting plan for its hosting customers to enjoy tension-free hosting at a competitive price.
How I Reduce My Website Bandwidth?
If you don’t afford to upgrade your hosting plan, consider limiting the bandwidth available to your site. For this, you may need to compress your website images and the size of massive downloads and videos on your website.
Consider utilizing a cache plugin to enable compression from JavaScript, CSS, and HTML in this strategy. Your static material may also be stored on a Content Delivery Network near your audience. Again, it’ll reduce your website server load time.
If your shared hosting plan’s bandwidth is insufficient for your website, you should consider changing VPS hosting to pass your digital track smoothly.
How Do I Increase Bandwidth?
If you are a hosting customer, you don’t need to worry about increasing your web hosting bandwidth. We offer a wide range of hosting plans with multiple bandwidth options and features to facilitate our hosting customers. From web hosting, upgrading or downgrading your account to increasing or decreasing your bandwidth limit is easy. To get detail, contact our sales.
Some web hosting companies offer additional bandwidth in emergencies or change web hosting plans per their customer’s demands.
Optimizing Your Bandwidth Usage
Overuse of bandwidth is one of the most common features of hosting plans. Therefore, before sign-in in, you need to know your website’s requirements.
When you notice your website is using more bandwidth than it needs to, there are a few things you can do to optimize your bandwidth, such as:
- Use an external host for images and graphics.
- Keeping site images & videos on external server
- Compress your images. videos
- Use a content delivery network
- Monitor your bandwidth usage as your website grows and keep an eye on your bandwidth usage to ensure that new additions to the website aren’t eating more
By optimizing your website’s bandwidth you’ll reduce your hosting costs.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you have a good understanding of web hosting bandwidth and what bandwidth is in web hosting. Keeping an eye on your website bandwidth will help you get decent returns in the long run. Therefore, I encourage you to pay more attention to your website bandwidth requirements and select the best web hosting plan to meet your hosting needs.