Bandwidth, the amount of traffic between your website and the internet, is an important consideration when setting up your web hosting. Every visit to your website gobbles up some of your monthly bandwidth allowance, so before you sign up for hosting, make sure you’ve crunched the numbers.
If you have a large website with millions of visitors each day, your website will need a hosting company who can provide you with enough bandwidth to cope.
Most small businesses do not consider bandwidth when selecting a hosting company, but if your bandwidth is not right for your website, you can suffer from an interrupted service, as well as penalties from the hosting company. It is worth considering that if your website goes down all the time, your viewers will become frustrated and you can lose conversions and sales.
What affects your bandwidth requirements?
The more complex your web pages, the greater the bandwidth needed to transfer your web page to a viewer’s browser. The more images, files, videos and sound files your website contains, the more complex your web pages and the more bandwidth is required – when compared with a web page that is primarily plain text, for example.
When you sign up for a hosting account, one of the factors that determines which plan you select is the bandwidth you require. You can actually calculate how much bandwidth you will need by adding up all of the file sizes for all of the individual components on your site and then totalling the amount of traffic you expect to visit your site on a monthly basis.
If you or your developer use FTP to transfer files to your website, then you also need to include these in your calculations, when estimating your bandwidth requirements.
You can estimate your bandwidth requirements here: https://www.easycalculation.com/other/website-traffic-bandwidth.php
However, you need to know the number of visitors per month, the number of page views and the average page size. This will give you your monthly required bandwidth.
Selecting a hosting provider
Make sure that the hosting plan you select offers you the amount of bandwidth your website requires. Also compare prices as you would with any other service, but check as well how much the hosting company penalises you for exceeding your monthly bandwidth allocations. Ask whether they have a degree of flexibility in these allocations, for days when you might receive more traffic than usual – for example on holiday periods.
GO Creative hosts websites for businesses of all shapes and sizes in our Government-certified Australian data centre. This means we can offer super fast speeds and customised plans to suit your needs. Contact us if you need more information, or would like a comparison of features and prices with your current hosting provider.
