Why Monitor Internet Bandwidth?

If you manage a wide area network (WAN) where there is a lot of site interaction, if you incorporate Cloud services into your IT infrastructure, or if your primary sales channel is your website, your bandwidth monitoring needs to include both internet performance and network bandwidth utilization.

You most likely have a service agreement with an internet provider that allows you to connect your company to the internet and communicate with suppliers and clients. It’s possible that the plan you picked doesn’t give you enough bandwidth. Only when you track bandwidth usage on your internet connections will you become aware of that circumstance.

Technically, the term “bandwidth” refers to the data transfer rate of a computer network. However, it’s simpler to think of it in terms of web hosting packages as your mobile phone plan. You might have a “unlimited” phone plan or a phone plan that only allows you to use a certain amount of data each month. Similar to that, your web hosting bandwidth regulates the amount of data that your website can send rather than how much you use your phone.

For example, the homepage of YouTube is 2 megabytes (MB) in size.

For YouTube to send its homepage to ten users, it needs 20 MB of bandwidth. Without sufficient bandwidth, YouTube wouldn’t be able to send anyone its homepage, which would prevent anyone from accessing their website to watch videos.

The same holds true for your website.

Many of your visitors won’t be able to access your website if your hosting plan doesn’t include enough bandwidth. That implies that you will miss out on a ton of profitable traffic.

This article will demonstrate:

• Why your website requires a lot of bandwidth.
• How to calculate your bandwidth needs accurately.
• How to pick a hosting package with enough bandwidth.

Let’s get started!

Why Bandwidth is Important for Your Business

You are aware that bandwidth is essential if people are to be able to access your website because we have already discussed what it is. But why is having a lot of it important?

Here are three key justifications for including lots of bandwidth in your hosting package:

• More media elements can be added to your website: If your bandwidth is limited, you won’t be able to send your website to many people, especially if it contains a lot of images, videos, and animations. However, if you have a lot of bandwidth, you won’t have to worry about going over your allotted amount of bandwidth when adding content to your website.
• Less likelihood of a website crash means: Let’s say your plan includes bandwidth for 1,000 visitors, but you receive 5,000 in a single month. The majority of the 5,000 visitors would not be able to access your website due to a lack of bandwidth. It makes sense to have more bandwidth so that everyone can access your website even if traffic increases.
• More pages on your website are available for visitors to view: A hosting package with a lot of bandwidth is a good idea if you’re creating a website that will frequently have new pages, like blog posts and product pages. If you do, all those new pages will be accessible to your visitors.

In other words, your site can support more rich content and traffic the more bandwidth you have.

The Best Way To Determine Your Bandwidth Needs

You don’t need to determine your bandwidth needs if you’ve just launched your website and don’t yet have many visitors. You can get by with a basic hosting plan up until your audience expands.

On the other hand, if your current hosting plan’s bandwidth limit has been reached and you want to upgrade to a new plan or switch hosting providers, you should be aware of how much bandwidth you actually require.

It’s simple to determine that, but first, you must keep in mind that your provider will monitor your bandwidth and keep a running tally of the amount of data your website has sent.

Every hosting plan will have some sort of bandwidth restriction, and every time someone visits your website, you’ll get closer to that restriction.

As a result, here is a three-step process for determining your bandwidth needs:

1. Check the number of monthly visitors to your website. It’s simple to find the data in your Google Analytics.

2. Find out how many pages each visitor views on average. Again, you can check how many pages the typical visitor opens when visiting your website in your Google Analytics.

3. Determine your website’s typical page size. To determine the size of the web pages on your site, use a tool like Pingdom. Check as many pages as you can so that the average will be more precise.

Simply multiply all three numbers together when you have them, as in:

average pageviews per month multiplied by the average page size of a website

For instance, if you have 2,000 visitors each month who view an average of 4 pages each, and each page is 2 MB in size, your bandwidth usage would be as follows:

16 GB, or 2,000 x 4 x 2, is the result.

You can forecast your future bandwidth needs by making an estimate of your bandwidth usage.

You must buy a hosting package with at least 50% more bandwidth than what you actually require. This will give you room to expand the content on your website and manage traffic peaks when it unexpectedly becomes well-liked.

How to Select Correct Hosting Plan Depend on Your Bandwidth Requirement

You’ll discover that there are various types of bandwidth plans available when you look at the hosting packages that the majority of providers offer. Metered bandwidth is strictly constrained. For instance, if your hosting package includes 10 GB of metered bandwidth, you are not permitted to use more than that amount by even a single byte.

However, some plans give you more flexibility by not limiting your bandwidth. It won’t matter if you estimate that you’ll use 10 GB of bandwidth but actually use 15 GB or 20 GB instead. Although in theory you could use all the bandwidth you wanted with such a plan, there is undoubtedly a cap. You’ll need to find out what that cap is from your hosting company.

These two hosting service types have very different bandwidth restrictions. Here is a brief description of each:

• Shared hosting: Your website shares resources with other websites in a shared hosting environment. This implies that you will share resources like processing power, disk space, and bandwidth. Shared hosting would be a good option if you’re just starting out or if your website doesn’t get a lot of traffic.
• VPS: is a type of hosting that provides you with dedicated resources that are only accessible by your website. Although it is typically more expensive than shared hosting, the advantage is that you get a hosting package that is much more robust and secure and has a lot more bandwidth.

You can get bandwidth that starts at 1 TB (1,000 GB) if you choose a VPS service. If any of the following apply to you, you might require that kind of bandwidth:

• You manage a number of popular websites.
• More than a million people per month visit your website.
• You run a website with a lot of content, such as a news or eCommerce site.
• In these situations, website owners typically need to buy a VPS hosting package to meet their bandwidth requirements.

As previously stated, a shared hosting package will provide you with enough bandwidth if you’re just getting started, say, with fewer than 50,000 visitors per month.

Conclusion

Your website’s bandwidth can be optimized to keep costs low and customer satisfaction high. We sincerely hope that this article has helped you better understand what web hosting bandwidth is and how much of it your website actually uses.

HostForLIFE.eu provides premium ASP.NET hosting packages. All sizes of websites are supported by our hosting plans’ unmetered bandwidth options.