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The Truth on Bandwidth Web Hosting
Are you thinking hosting your web site with a new hosting company or possibly just switching your hosting over? Many web hosting companies offer a variety of options. Upon glancing at them, you might think that they are all the same with just different prices. However, there are many key differences that make these services different. The best web hosting services offers live assistance supports the latest script, and has a high bandwidth limit.
Bandwidth
What is bandwidth anyways? In black and white bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The hosting services bandwidth is determined by its connection type. This relates both internally and externally. The higher the bandwidth the faster your page will load and this will help in terms of SEO which will get your page listed on Google, Yahoo, and MSN faster.
Do You Have Enough Bandwidth For Your Traffic?
A good analogy for bandwidth is the cars and the freeway. Simply, if you are on the freeway and you are down to one lane than the traffic is going to go super slow. However, if you are on the freeway and there are 12 lanes than the traffic will be easier and bandwidth works the same way.
There are a couple of different formulas you need if you want to determine how much bandwidth you need for you site. There is one for determining a traditional page which does not have any downloading information from you. If you do not have anyone downloading information from your page the simple formula for determining how much bandwidth you need is:
No Download Formula:
Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor
However, if you are setting up a site where people download videos, pictures, pdfs, etc. then there is an alternate formula that you should use for calculating your bandwidth needed. The formula for downloading is as follows:
Download Formula:
[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size)
(Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor
Defining These Formula Terms
Average Daily Visitors: This is number of visitors that you expect to come to your site. There is no limit to what you anticipate to come to your site. There could be 5 people a day or 10,000,000 people coming to your site a day.
Average Page Views: You may have 100 pages on your site. If the average person looks at your site and views 10 pages then you have to keep that in mind when determining the average page views.
Average Page Size: You need to figure out how big each page is in kilobytes (KB.) If you do not know how big your web pages are you can estimate it. To find out the average size take all of your pages add them together and then divide by the total number of web pages. Remember to calculate the size of pages in kilobytes.
Average Daily File Downloads: This number is an anticipated number of downloads per day.
Average File Size: This is similar to average page size but in order to know this number you need to calculate the files that will be downloaded. To get this figure you add all the downloadable files together and then divide by the total number of files.
Fudge Factor: This a number that is greater than one. I would generally go with 1.5 and this means that you could be off on your numbers by 50%. However, you could put a fudge factor of 2-4 to be really safe that you have a good estimate of bandwidth needed.
Important Note:
It is important to note that each hosting service host shows there bandwidth per month. This number is defined in gigabytes (GB.) A lot of companies have it set up so that you can increase your monthly bandwidth for a fixed rate. However, I would not encourage that you go ahead and pay for a ton of bandwidth until you have gained a substantial amount of traffic.
