How Much Bandwidth Do You Need?

Web hosting companies typically highlight two significant features in all of their packages: disk space and bandwidth (also called data transfer). Most people are quite aware of how much disk space they will need to run their web site, but often times the word “bandwidth” is confusing.

How much bandwidth do you actually need? The answer to that question largely depends on the type of site you will have. Hosting companies may offer anything from a few gigabytes (GB) of bandwidth to “unlimited” amounts.

Bandwidth is the amount of information sent from the web server to a user’s computer. For example, if your web site has one 12 kilobyte(KB) page and one 500KB picture, each visitor will use 512KB of bandwidth. If you have 20,000 unique visits to your site in a month, that is about 10GB of bandwidth used in that month.

Therefore, if you have more content, you will need more bandwidth. If you have a site with numerous images or photo galleries, streaming audio or video, or just hundreds of pages, your bandwidth requirements will be greater.

The average personal website does not reach the 10GB threshold mentioned above, and most web hosts offer more than that. Businesses might need more, and media sites will probably need the most. The key is knowing what you intend to offer visitors and how much information you will send.