Calculate Your Bandwidth
It’s not easy to determine how much bandwidth is necessary for any given hosting. Rarely do we track our own personal usage closely enough for any frame of reference, and while allotted bandwidth for any given hosting plan may seem plentiful, overage costs are usually quite heavy should bandwidth needs be under-estimated. Here are some guidelines to help you estimate how much bandwidth you may need for any given hosting setup.
First, think of your hosting needs. Particularly, what servers are you planning on hosting, and the rough number of expected users? If hosting servers with potentially large bandwidth needs, what content do you plan to supply? How much bandwidth you require varies widely based upon these factors. For instance, even personal sites can use lots of bandwidth when hosting podcasts, photos or other large files that can quickly become popular.
One logical method for calculating bandwidth necessary for hosting a website involves the following formula: Site visitors X page views X average page size X days per month X safety factor. This can help determine if any given hosting plan will meet your needs. It can also help evaluate whether an existing provider can continue to meet visitor demand as popularity grows and, should it not do so indefinitely, to determine when action is necessary and what
steps to take.
In case of the above equation, it is very important to bear in mind the safety factor, which shoud generally fall between.5 and 2.0. Essentially, this number guarantees you bandwidth flexibility that may come in handy with sudden spikes in popularity. While it may seem tempting to omit this variable and cut costs, an unavailable site can spell the difference between a successful venture and a failed one. What is more, extra fees for using too much bandwidth can easily reduce the savings you made by cutting the costs on bandwidth.
There are many ways to use bandwidth more efficiently if there is the need. Much can be saved by offloading some hosting to specialized systems which, while not as flexible as typical web hosts, are particularly optimized for specific types of content or for other large files. Podcasts, music, photos and other forms of media can be hosted on third-party sites optimized for such needs, and can be linked to from your main site. Also, generic solutions such as Amazon’s Simple Storage System (S3) enable efficient and inexpensive hosting of large volumes of data.
Nowaday many web hosts set up very high limits of bandwidth or even none at all. Still, it’s not good to give up quality solutions only bcause they offer less bandwidth than others do. Bandwidth is one of many factors that make up a quality host, but it can easily become inflated by web hosts who offer high limits being certain that most users will come nowhere near them. Such solutions can quickly attract customers, but can just as easily backfire when servers are over-provisioned and bandwidth becomes scarce. Being aware of your average bandwidth needs and the options available in case you get close to your limit, you can easily avoid this trap and choose the best host for you. Also if you are planning to have a multimedia site it might be a good idea to choose a hosting company that provides vps service for you to easily upgrade.