What is Bandwidth in Web Hosting and Why You should Care About It?
When you are planning to start a new website, all you need to worry about is finding the most stable web hosting provider for your website. As it is the main key for building a website that won’t fail you and you from your visitors. However, as your website comes up with high web traffic, you can demand or better content delivery.
Some web hosts might look reliable as they are, but they don’t have the capacity to shelter hundreds of thousands of visitors at the same time.
The capacity here we are referring to is website bandwidth. Website bandwidth is the rate at which data is transferred from the web hosting provider to the visitor’s device.
As mentioned, website bandwidth plays a vital role in making a website’s performance. If your web hosting provider is unable to provide unlimited bandwidth, then you won’t be able to provide your website visitors with the kind of experience they deserve.
As an analogy, think of website bandwidth as a funnel and as traffic or as water. When you put water into a funnel, it flows down the spout. The amount of water that can circulate down from the funnel depends upon the size of the sprout. The smaller in size will take longer for all the water to go down.
Therefore, if you don’t want your website visitors to wait long for your website to load. Or from downloading a large size of file from your website, then you need a larger amount of website bandwidth.
How much bandwidth is enough?
Bandwidth depends on what kind of website you have. However, there is a way to calculate website bandwidth that will help you find out how much your actual website requires.
All you need to do is multiply your website’s average visitors, average page size, and the average number of pages on your website each visitor goes to. To find out your website’s average page size, move to the WebPageTest and run your website there.
For the web traffic and average page visits, you can check it on your Google Analytics account. If you don’t have access to Google Analytics, head over your website on SEMrush’s Traffic Analyzer. It will give you an estimated number of monthly visitors. For example – Let’s take an average webpage size of 75 KB (75,000), average monthly visitors of 50,000, and an average number of visited pages at 5, then below the amount of bandwidth your website needs:
75,000 x 50,000 x 5 = 18,75,00,00,000
That means your website needs at least 10 GB monthly website bandwidth to provide visitors with a seamless hosting service. If you deliver a lot of content relate to videos or downloadable content, then you have a good amount of bandwidth.
So, how you can increase the bandwidth of your website?
If your bandwidth demand is more than what your web hosting provider can offer, the most logical step is to inquire about all the better plans or you can migrate to another web hosting provider. Websites that are on shared hosting providers are most likely to have unmetered bandwidth. Companies that mostly offer shared hosting. They don’t really track your bandwidth but they can alert you via email if your website is using more than the average bandwidth. As it’s a shared server, huge consumption of bandwidth by one website could affect neighborhood websites.
Hosting your website on a server with higher plans can increase your financial expense. Rather than moving to expensive web hosting plans, you can reduce the consumption of bandwidth by reducing the size of website pages. By doing this, you don’t need to move out of your existing web hosting.
You can follow some other ways to maximize your bandwidth: –
Using a Caching Plugin – Caching tool allows to store files into the web browsers. If the same user visits your website again, a lot of files will load locally. With this, you don’t have to fetch data from the website servers. If you are using WordPress, you can install WP Rocket. This will makes your website load faster.
Compress Image Size – If you own a website with lots of images. You should consider decreasing the size of images. This way, you make them easier to load and also your website. Generally, most of the tools optimize images automatically.
CDN (Content Delivery Network) – A CDN uses servers from different geographical locations. In this way, users can fetch data from the nearest server and this will also help in reducing the loading time of the website.
Conclusion
Finding the right web hosting that offers the right monthly bandwidth for your website is the first step towards your website success. By understanding the usage of bandwidth, you can save a lot of financial expenses and time. You won’t face any web traffic problems even later down the road. For proper usage of bandwidth, you need the cloud hosting India. You can connect with Go4hosting for the finest cloud hosting services and plans.
