How much bandwidwith do I need

Determining how much bandwidth is necessary for a particular hosting situation is a difficult task. 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 determine how much bandwidth to anticipate using for any given hosting setup.

First, think of your hosting needs. Specifically, what servers are you planning on hosting, and how many users do you anticipate? If hosting servers with potentially large bandwidth needs, what content do you plan to supply? The required amount of bandwidth differs considerably depending on 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 evaluate whether an existing provider can continue to meet visitor demand as popularity grows and, should it not do so indefinitely, to determine when action is necessary and what
steps you should take.

The safety factor in the above equation is crucial to take into account, and should generally fall between 1.5 and 2.0. In essence, this number takes into effect the consequences that sudden spikes in popularity may have on your bandwidth needs. 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 various ways to use bandwidth more efficiently when necessary. There's much to be saved by offloading some hosting to specialized systems, not as flexible as standard web hosts, yet particularly optimized for specific content or for other large files. Podcasts, music, photos and the like can easily be hosted on third-party sites adapted for such needs and 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. Still, it's not good to give up quality solutions only bcause they offer less bandwidth than others do. 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. Such solutions can quickly attract customers, but can just as easily backfire when servers are over-provisioned and bandwidth becomes scarce. By becoming aware of roughly how much bandwidth is necessary, and by knowing what options are available should you find yourself near your limit, you can effectively avoid this trap and choose the host that best meets your specific needs. Also if you are planning to have a multimedia site it would be wise to consider using vps hosting. Here are some cheap vps providers you can start with