There are many factors you need to consider when searching for the proper web hosting provider. Of course, some of them are more important than others, and if we need to highlight the two of them, it surely will be the webspace and the bandwidth. What is the most important with these two factors is how much both of them you’ll get choosing the one hosting package, and will it be enough for your needs. In this article, you will get to know How much bandwidth does your website needs for efficient work.
Sometimes it’s not that easy to calculate how much webspace and bandwidth you need, especially if you’re just about to run a new website without previous experience in searching for the right solutions.
How much web space do you need? What is bandwidth and why is it important? How can you easily determine what exactly you need for your website? Let’s talk about it in a simple form.
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What is bandwidth?
In simple words – bandwidth is the term used as a measurement for the amount of data that can be transferred from point A to point B within a network in a specific amount of time. It’s typically expressed as a bitrate and measured in bits per second (also known as bps).
To simplify things, just try to imagine this: water that flows through a pipe. In that case, bandwidth would be the speed at which water flows through the pipe under specific circumstances. Bandwidth is water, and the pipe is a connection. The maximum amount of water that can flow through the pipe would be a maximum bandwidth, while the amount of water that is currently flowing through the pipe represents the current bandwidth.
A wider bandwidth may sound great, but keep in mind that it’s more expensive, and sometimes your business doesn’t need that. Of course, you don’t need a slow connection either.
How you can figure out how much bandwidth your website actually needs?
Basic guidelines
It’s logical that your website needs enough space because there are files and lots of other stuff you need to upload to your web hosting. Images, multimedia, content, HTML files take lots of space, and you don’t want your website to be incomplete, neither slow because you haven’t enough space and too many files. How much webspace and bandwidth you need is mostly determined by the type of your website or a website you want to create.
- Blogs and personal websites usually don’t need a lot of space, because it consists of posting blog posts, pictures and sometimes some multimedia. Multimedia is usually recommended not to be posted directly on a website but previously to be uploaded on some site specialized for it.
- If you’re about to establish a business website or website that requires some dynamic content like audio and video scripts, you’ll need more space. That is especially important to know if you want to work with content marketing because that kind of dynamic content is usually more demanding.
- E-commerce websites that specialized in online shopping will require probably the most webspace and bandwidth because of many product pages that contain high-resolution images or video content that requires lots of space.
One thing is important to keep in mind: some websites take much more webspace and bandwidth than the others, even the biggest ones, all because of their content and their purpose. Those kinds of websites are usually specialized for music, video games content, or video.
How to calculate how much bandwidth and webspace you need?
The average and highly recommended average page size is 2 MB at most. It’s because the pages larger than 2 MB are loading slowly and that is the main cause of poor user experience. Sometimes it’s not a large web page that is slowing downloading, but a poorly optimized website, so be sure you’ve done everything for optimizing it.
Webspace need depends on the number of pages you want on your website. Knowing that you can calculate approximate webspace capacity: average page size multiplied with the number of pages (yes, that simple). The bandwidth equation is the following: webspace multiply with page loads per month.
Don’t be in the present – think about future
It may sound like some motivational quote, but when establishing a website you also need to include some potential future plans for it, and, more important, the back-end features of your hosting. Features like software for various things like shopping carts, databases, processing payments, counters, etc. also need space that you need to provide if you want everything to work properly.
Logically, the more things and features you want to add to your website, the more webspace, and bandwidth you need. Also, if you’re establishing a small or medium website with a tendentious of growth in the future, you need also to include that growth so you can find a proper hosting solution.
Today you can find lots of hosting companies that provide hosting solutions for all kinds of websites, depending on their size and purpose. For example, if you have a WordPress website you can find a hosting solution made especially for WordPress websites that you can adapt to your needs in the deal with the hosting company.
Many hosting solutions mean many features and combinations you can use for your website – the price depends on how much disk space, loading speed, kind of website, etc. The bigger your website is, the more features you’ll need, so the price will be bigger. If you are in pursuit of a hosting provider with proven satisfied customers you should check Hostinger: it offers affordable solutions for all kinds of websites and it has the best reviews. Of course, as we said in the beginning, you don’t need to choose the most expensive solution if the capacity of your website doesn’t require it because it will be perfectly okay with some medium solution (and you’ll save them money, too). But if you’re about to establish a big e-commerce website you need to invest in a proper hosting solution that can support that amount of data and expected traffic.
Some researchers say that the average internet user won’t be waiting for a web page to load more than 2 seconds. More important, once a user leaves and searches for another website, probably will never come back to yours again. It’s called bad user experience and it can become a nightmare that impacts not just your positioning on a SERP, but it can impact your business too: nobody likes anything less than perfect.
