Knowing how to calculate bandwidth is important and easy. Take the size of your website to be 10 KB and that twenty people visit your site each day. This would mean your bandwidth usage could be calculated 10 x 20 bites for a day. Multiplying this figure by the amount of days in a month would give you your monthly bandwidth usage. It can be handy to know the other measurements as sometimes bandwidth is listed in bytes.

8 bits = 1 byte and 1024 bytes = 1 Kilobytes

It is easy to use bandwidth unnecessarily and the biggest culprits are large sized graphics and a lot of customer comments. It is also fair to say that if the end user seeks to receive a lot of images or large amounts of data that they too will use a fair share of bandwidth. This has to be borne in mind when you are constructing your website. It is common to want to add a lot of cool audio and visual treats to your site but doing so will greatly increase your bandwidth consumption. Knowing how much bandwidth you expect to use will help you seek the right package for your usage but beware of web host providers not living up to their promise. There are some providers who will not deliver what they guarantee and this makes choosing the correct supplier an important task.

Understand the amount of bandwidth that fits your requirements.

How would you known that what is the required bandwidth of your website? This question needs to be answered from technical and mathematical point of view. This would also determine the website content you are having and have projected to include in future. It is always better to keep some bandwidth in hand as it would allow you to develop the website and include new features later on. You should take out some time in determining the bandwidth required for your website. If required you can discuss the issue with your web hosts who can suggest you better on this. Almost every hosting company measures the bandwidth plan on a monthly basis and hence you can chart your requirements based n that only. Bandwidth is generally measured as:

Average Page Views x Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Size Fudge Factor x 30

To ensure the best use of your site, many website owners decide to offer a larger amount of bandwidth and an equation for this would be:

[(Daily Visitors x Page Views x Page Size) + (Daily File Downloads x File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Note: All these are measured based on average data.

Relation between bandwidth and traffic:

Bandwidth and traffic are closely interlinked with each other. Visitors can experience best the bandwidth as they are the people who carry out various activities with the websites. If a visitor wants to download an MP3 files from a website into the computer, then 4MB traffic is created between the website and the user’s computer. If the user is having a fast internet connection then the file won’t take much time to get downloaded and hence the bandwidth consumed in the process would be low. The reverse happens if the internet connectivity is poor. Traffic is measured by the number of bits that are transferred on network connections.

Handy ways to reduce your bandwidth size.

We all dread bills and an unexpected bill can really cause panic and problems to a person. If you exceed your bandwidth amount, your provider is well within their rights to charge you for this as well as send you a reminder to keep your usage down. This may obviously cause you problems and you could be wondering how you can fix this problem.

Yours website has several files, each of these files have respective sizes of their own. Each of these files, when used by the visitors, consumes some of the website bandwidth. You have control on the bandwidth usage of your website and can increase or decrease these according to the requirements. Another easy way to cut down bandwidth expenses is to prevent the use of too many files, graphics, images and downloadable file son your website. These files themselves are heavy and when downloaded by multiple users, can consume lots of bandwidth thus increasing cost. Suppose there is a large image in the webpage that is downloaded each time a visitor views the website. Then also the same thing happens and unnecessary bandwidth expenditure takes place. If removing the web page images is not possible, then try to decrease its size and you can seen the dramatic change in the bill, next time, when the web hosting company hand it over to you. Cascading Style Sheets also help you to save bandwidth as they reduce HTML file sizes considerably.

Ways to improve your bandwidth use:

• Always keep an estimation of the number of visiting or can visit your page in future. A monthly estimation is always beneficial.
• It may be possible to purchase a meter free bandwidth facility. This facility may feature a higher than usual cost compared to a limited bandwidth provision but clearly there is no risk of going beyond a pre-set limit. The bandwidth rating is contained on your control panel but it will not be continually assessed by your web host.
• If you make changes in your website then always calculate the current web page size or else you will not be able to keep track of the bandwidth bills.
• If you can, keep the number of visitors comments to a minimum. You may wish to allow only pre-approved or carefully selected comments onto your site.
• Talk to your web hosting company regularly for upgrading your website. Upgrading doesn’t always mean that there will be an increase in the bandwidth consumption. But this can also decrease the consumption of bandwidth by elimination unnecessary files.
• If you use JavaScript then instead of embedding it in each page, use it externally.
• If you resize any of your graphics or logo, remember to refresh and upload to ensure your bandwidth usage is kept to a minimum.

Last points you should remember:

It is your web host that can guide you bets on bandwidth. Selection of the right web host can matter if your want a proper guidance on web hosting services. The structure and the content of the WebPages would definitely determine the bandwidth expenses. But the effective guidance from the web hosts can equally help you on this regard. Bandwidth theft is a common practice in which the people use other sites images by simply linking them with another page. Such practices, without notice, can be punishable and should not be practices. So if you are a novice, and your website owner advises you on this then always try to avoid. Before discussing with the web host regarding bandwidth and always better to make a study and some research on bandwidth. Your website developers can also guide you extensively in informing about the techniques to save bandwidth.

Article is published with permission from,a leading provider of comprehensive reviews of web hosting companies. Visit http://www.webhostingmadness.com for more information about and exclusive deals on web hosting.