How Much Bandwidth / Data Transfer Do You Need?

In most cases, you'll be limited to the amount of traffic you can drive to your web site per month. Traffic (also called data transfer or bandwidth) is the combined size of all the files transferred from your web-hosting server to your customer's browsers. Depending on the traffic that comes to your site, and how much detailing is involved in your html pages, determines how much the cost of traffic fees you will be expected to pay.

Transfer rates of 5-20 GB per month are common (GB stands for "gigabytes" - one gigabyte is one thousand megabytes). This traffic is measured by the amount of data you send and receive from your web site. For instance, if your home page has 2 graphics that are each 20k in size, plus some text that adds another 40k, then your home page is a total of 80k in traffic each time a user requests the page. At that rate, 100,000 visitors to your home page in one month will take up approximately 8 GB alone in transfer traffic.

To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3GB of bandwidth per month.

Bandwidth is the number one thing that people get charged extra for by their web host. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes popular, so you will need to also check their policy for overages: is there a published charge per GB over the allowed bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are you expected to pre-pay for a potential overage?

Some hosts charge outrageous amounts for extra bandwidth such as $10 per extra GB. Prices are steeper with the cheaper hosts. A host may even decide to turn off your web site if you go over your monthly bandwidth limit.