Enough Bandwidth – How to Determine?
One of the important considerations in choosing a dedicated server plan is the amount of bandwidth you’re going to subscribe to. The amount of bandwidth that you’ll give to your site would have a large effect on the site’s performance and the experience of your visitors. Not enough bandwidth, and your visitors will experience sluggish performance, and some other visitors might not even be able to visit your site. When that happens, you lose possible revenue for your online business. On the other hand, if you get too high a bandwidth, you may have more speed than what your site needs. The main disadvantage to this is that you’re paying for bandwidth that you’re not utilizing, which means unnecessary cost for you.
It is for the reasons above that you need to consider carefully the amount of bandwidth that you’ll get when getting a dedicated server. If you get one that’s just right, you keep your site’s optimum performance while keeping your costs reasonable.
Calculate Your Bandwidth Needed
The factors that you need to consider when calculating the bandwidth that you need would be your page sizes, the number of pages you will host, the average page view, the number of visitors, and the services that you would provide in your site. If you host downloads, you would have to look at the average file size and the average number of downloads per day. You would multiply those values by 30 (which represents the average number of days per month) and a redundancy factor. The result or product would be the base amount of bandwidth that your site would need in a month.
For example, you have an average file size of 17 KB, with an average pageview of 7 per visitor. The average visitors that you have daily is 2000. Let’s say you have a redundancy factor of 1.5. If you multiply all of those by 30, what you would need is about 11 GB of bandwidth to support your website. As you can imagine, the number would increase if you add file downloads to your site. The same is true if you host functions like games, video and audio streaming, and flash animation on your site.
Traffic & Price Issues
The factors given above can change depending on the site and the traffic that your site generates. That means there’s no really fixed amount when it comes to bandwidth since the amount that you need would depend on the demand for your site. But as a guide, you can use the above calculation when selecting the hosting plan for your site.
Calculating bandwidth is also important if you plan to be a reseller. If you have your own dedicated server and plan to sell extra server space to other site owners, you can use the calculation in generating plans and assessing what your server can handle without compromising performance.
Bandwidth allocation is one of the things that can make or break your site. Too little and you run the risk of losing visitors, too much and you end up paying for more than you need. This is why choosing the right bandwidth is one of the essentials in dedicated server selection.