How Much Bandwidth Is Enough?

With the limited budgets with which most people approach their online enterprises, the issue of bandwidth becomes very tricky indeed. It means that the site owner has to constantly predict the sort of traffic and ultimately bandwidth use that will happen at their site well in advance. This can be a nightmare in a situation where a site is expanding rapidly in terms of traffic.

The reason why many site owners have to do this is because they can hardly afford to pay for idle bandwidth and therefore opt to expand and increase resources as the need arises. It certainly saves money but can spell doom for a site.

It means that apart from being an excellent online marketer, the situation now calls for a site owner to also be a fortuneteller with great accuracy! How else are you going to be able to predict your bandwidth usage over the next few months?

However to try out your hand at some rough estimates, it is important that you know exactly what is that is on your site and then you need to know the size of every file.

Let us assume that your page consists of the main html file that is 7Kb and also has two images of 25Kb each. In total it means that that particular page takes up 57Kb. If you expect an average of 100 hits a day it means that you need 171,000Kb or 171Mb bandwidth, monthly. But this is not all. You will also need to take into account additional bandwidth for search engine robots.

The most effective way of approaching this problem is to calculate the estimated possible bandwidth that you estimate you will need, and then make allowances by having a little extra on hand, just in case. It will also be useful if you have an emergency plan in place, to fall back on, so that in the event that your site performs better than expected and attracts more visitors you can almost instantly expand your resources to accommodate them without first going through the delay process as you negotiate with your hosts.