How Much Bandwidth is ideal for your website?

By Ashish Monga
Bandwidth is one of the most important factors people look at before choosing a particular hosting package. Deciding on the amount of bandwidth needed for their hosting package is a common concern among many people. Buying too much bandwidth might mean paying for bandwidth that might not be needed at all, and hence could result in waste of money, whereas if the bandwidth falls short, it can lead to other problems such as overage fees or a complete shutdown for a period. Hence it is crucial to decide how much bandwidth your website will need well in advance and then choose the right hosting package accordingly.

There are many different factors that need to be considered before deciding how much bandwidth would be ideal for your website. These factors can be broadly categorized under two major categories:

1. Content and structure of your website

2. Popularity of your website

Content and structure of the website : This refers to the purpose of the website. If your website offers a lot of content which is plain text, then it would not consume a lot of bandwidth, also known as data-transfer, and the pages would also load quickly but if the pages contain a large amount of pictures and animations then they would take a lot more bandwidth. Similarly, if you offer files for download, that would eat up valuable bandwidth, and hence your bandwidth requirements would be much larger. For e.g. if you offer a 4MB file for download, every time someone downloads it, 4MB of bandwidth is used up. The number of files offered for download, will of course, be a major factor in deciding how much bandwidth would be ideal for your site.

Popularity of the website : Popularity of your website refers to the amount of traffic your website would receive. If your website receives large volumes of traffic it is imperative to be prepared for that traffic, and hence have higher bandwidth available. This is where carefully observing and analysing your web statistics is extremely crucial. It not only tells, the pace at which the traffic is rising (preparing you for possible bandwidth upgrades) but also tells which pages and files are taking up the most amount of bandwidth.

It is also important to take steps to make sure that bandwidth isn’t unnecessarily wasted. Some of the things that you can do to preserve some bandwidth include:

1. Carefully designing the website. Not loading pages with too many pictures.
2. Compressing .jpeg and .gif images using available tools.
3. Prevent robots from stealing bandwidth by using a robots.txt file for preventing them going to pages where you don’t need them, for e.g. profile pages of a forum.
4. You can also consider hosting your images on a website, that provides free image hosting, although this comes with a lot of risk, and some additional work.
5. Using CSS can also be an effective way of saving bandwidth. It is designed to reduce HTML file size by attributing values for any HTML element/command at the beginning of the document.

Although this would help you come up with a rough estimate of your bandwidth requirements, it is important to observe and monitor your bandwidth over a period of time to make the right decisions.

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