How Much Bandwidth Does Your Site Really Need?

If you are on the lookout for a web hosting service provider, one of the things that you need to consider is the amount of disk space and bandwidth that they can provide you with. When you check on the features included in a basic web hosting package, you will usually see the term "Unlimited bandwidth".

However, there is the issue of the unlimited bandwidth offer as being a marketing ploy to encourage users to sign up for the service. How much website does a typical website really use up? If your site has a lot of visitors on a monthly basis, do you really need an unlimited number of bandwidth in order for your site to be fully functional?

Why It's all about the Bandwidth when it Comes to Dedicated Hosting

To have a deeper understanding of how bandwidth measurement relates to web hosting, here's a brief definition. In layman's term, bandwidth is the amount of traffic which is allowed to occur between your website and the Internet.

If you go for dedicated hosting, for example, the bandwidth that the web hosting company can provide you with will depend on their network connections – both the one which is internal to the data center and the external one on the Internet.

Take the home page of a search engine as an example. Every time an online user visits a website, traffic is created because in order to view the search engine's web page on your computer, it is first being downloaded onto your computer through the browser.

A simple home page which does not contain video can have a size of about 70 kilobytes. On the other hand, the home page of a website which has a lot of interactive multimedia features can have a size of about 200 kilobytes.

Dedicated Hosting: Measuring How Much GB a Website Requires to Run Smoothly

Now, let us take a look at the basic bandwidth requirements of different websites. The following list provides the bandwidth requirements for a dedicated hosting plan, depending on the type of site that you have:

- If you have a website which has a large-sized content, you are going to use up a significant amount of bandwidth.
- If your website is made up of hundreds or even thousands of web pages which are packed with images and multimedia features, then you need to use a dedicated hosting package which allows you to use up as much bandwidth as you need.
- If you have a relatively modest website in terms of size but you are receiving thousands of hits per day, this will result to a large amount of traffic. However, there is no need to break a sweat about the bandwidth because the small file size of the web pages that a particular site has will still be relatively small.

In most cases, the average website on the Internet is a cross between the high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth requirement which is shown in the examples above.

If you belong to the average website category when it comes to the file size of the web pages that you have, as well as the amount of traffic that you are receiving on a daily basis – then 3 to 5 GB of bandwidth should be enough for you.

Sites which have large file downloads available and include a lot of multimedia features on their web pages should opt for a dedicated hosting plan which offers about 50 GB of bandwidth – or more.

To sum it all up, you should choose a web hosting plan which offers at the very least 3GB of bandwidth. You will definitely need more than that if you receive hundreds of hits per day, if you have files available for download and if you have a lot of multimedia content on your site.