Determining how much bandwidth is necessary for any given hosting situation is challenging. We usually don’t track our personal usage close enough to have a clear idea of our needs. And while the amount of bandwidth alloted for a given hosting plan may seem very generous, overage costs are mostly quite high with underestimated bandwidth needs. 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. Specifically, what kind of servers are you planning on hosting, and how many users do you expect? If hosting servers with potentially large bandwidth needs, what content do you plan to provide? 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 is multiplying: site visitors by page views by average page size by days per month by safety factor. This can help determine if any given hosting plan will meet your needs. It can also help assess whether the current provider is able to keep meeting visitor demand as popularity grows and, if not, to determine when action is necessary and what
steps you should 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. It may seem tempting to do away with this variable and cut costs, still an unavailable site can spell the difference between a successful venture and a failed one. Furthermore, overage fees for using too much bandwidth can easily counteract any savings gained from attempting to cut costs in this manner.

There are a number of ways to use bandwidth more efficiently should the need arise. 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 cheap hosting of large amounts of data.

Nowaday many web hosts set up very high limits of bandwidth or even none at all. It is important not to sacrifice quality solutions because they offer less bandwidth than do their competition, however. 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. Solutions of this kind quickly attract customers, but problems may soon appear if 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 host large amount of videos or images it would be wise to consider using vps hosting.