How Much Bandwidth?
Determining how much bandwidth is necessary for a particular hosting situation is a difficult task. Rarely do we track our own personal usage closely enough for any frame of reference, and while allotted bandwidth for any given hosting plan may seem plentiful, overage costs are usually quite heavy should bandwidth needs be under-estimated. Here are some guidelines to help determine how much bandwidth to anticipate using for any given hosting setup.
First, identify your hosting needs. Particularly, what servers are you planning on hosting, and the rough number of expected users? If hosting servers with potentially large bandwidth needs, what content do you plan to provide? Depending on these factors, the amount of bandwidth you need varies considerably. 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 may help you check if a given hosting plan will meet your requirements. 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. Essentially, this number guarantees you bandwidth flexibility that may come in handy with sudden spikes in popularity. While it may seem tempting to omit this variable and cut costs, an unavailable site can spell the difference between a successful venture and a failed one. What is more, extra fees for using too much bandwidth can easily reduce the savings you made by cutting the costs on bandwidth.
There are a number of ways to use bandwidth more efficiently should the need arise. 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 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 inexpensive hosting of large volumes 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 makes up a quality host, and to some extent it is easily inflated, as web hosts can offer high limits while 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. 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 upload big amount of multimedia files you might need to look into vps solutions or dedicated servers.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.