What is bandwidth in web hosting?
Imagine to plan a road trip around Europe. After deciding all the cities you will be visiting, you calculate how much will it take moving from one stage to another. For example, if you want to go from Nice to Marseille, it will make a big difference to choose the large highway or a narrower coastal road. Bandwidth is the width of the road you choose to drive on. The larger it is, the faster you will reach your goal. The larger bandwidth your web hosting has, the more comfortable your visitors will feel.
Bandwidth is therefore a capacity (and not a speed!), i.e. the maximum amount of data volume that can be transmitted from one point to another over a certain period of time – the second. Thus, the bandwidth is expressed in megabits per second (Mbps): as higher the Mbps is, the more data your internet connection can send and receive at the same time. For instance, if you are downloading a movie you will need more bandwidth than when loading a webpage with text only. If your company’s employees are simultaneously working on the same network, they will need a larger bandwidth too in order to read files, download pages, reading emails, etc etc. Finally, if you have a webshop, the more visitors you have in a single portion of time, the slower their interaction with your server will be. Unless you already calculated how much bandwidth you need according to your traffic. This is the most common way to do it:
Bandwidth needed in a month = Average Page Views * Average Page Size * Average Monthly Visitors * Redundant Factor
The average Redundant Factor is something between 1.3 and 1.8. The Average Page Size can be easily calculated on https://tools.pingdom.com/ .
Still finding some difficulties? No worries, the following page will do all this job for you:
