Bandwidth Explained

Bandwidth, as it applies to web hosting, is the amount of traffic (people visiting your site, reading your pages, looking at photos, downloading files [like music], etc.) that is permitted to take place between your site and the rest of the world visiting your pages.

Below are are some very liberal and more realistic bandwidth calculations so you can see that the top rated web hosting plans listed here at Web Hosting Avatar will more than take care of the requirements of most web sites.

Let’s get some page sizes to work with:

  • Yahoo home page size: 41 kb (recommended)
  • Apple home page: 220 kb
  • CNN home page: 642 kb (Huge, but they gzip and compress their files)
  • Average web page size: 150 kb

When we figure in page size we sum the html, css, scripts, and all the images on a page.

Now, lets say your site has web page sizes of about 300 kb each (huge and not normal) and you get 10,000 visitors a day (you’re really popular) and they visit 100 pages each, your total bandwidth will be: 572 GB per month. Nearly all the plans in the quality hosting category offer 15,000 GB a month, at least.

Now, let’s do something more realistic: Your site has page sizes around 150 kb each and you get about 200 visitors a day and those visitors view all 15 pages of your site, you need 1 GB of transfer (bandwidth) per month.

Here’s another scenario: Your site has pages around 2500 kb (you have music files) and you get about 1000 visitors a day and they view 50 pages of your site, you need 238 GB of transfer (bandwidth) per month.

Now how did we come up with these amounts?

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor

The average site will not require more than 1-2 GBs a month.

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