Take the Pain Out of Website Hosting
I have a bunch of websites and have even ran a small website hosting company before. We were small and because our host charged us for bandwidth usage, we had to pass that cost on to our customers and charge them for bandwidth usage. We gave them 2 GB per month but that wasn’t enough for websites with high traffic and websites with audio and video on them. Thankfully those customers liked our service and stayed with us but there were a few that left and it made sense for them to do that.
How do you know if your website needs unlimited bandwidth hosting?
Think about it like this… if your whole website – every page, image, PDF file, audio file, etc. – took up 100 MB and your allowed bandwidth was (from my example above)0 2 GB, then your entire website could only be downloaded just over 20 times. Here’s the formula:
2 GB x 1024 = 2048 MB
2048 MB divided by 100 MB = 20.48
That’s just a rough number because not everyone coming to your website downloads the whole thing and there are some files in your web space that don’t get downloaded – like PHP scripts. So let’s modify our formula and say that instead of 100 MB of files, people coming to your website only download 400 kb (or 0.4 MB) of content per visit:
2048 MB divided by 0.4 MB = 5120
So that’s now over 5,000 visitors before you have to start worrying about going over on your bandwidth. So that’s like 2,500 visitor per every 1 GB of bandwidth. That’s not a ton of traffic, really. That’s like 166 visitors per day. I’ve got a regional website that gets over 3000 visitors a day. So 2 GB of bandwidth is OK for some websites, but the majority of websites need unlimited bandwidth hosting.
You don’t want your web hosting account shut down for too much use. People that may be trying to come to your website for your products and services might see an error page instead of your website. Yes, some web hosts are set up like that. Also, search engines may be coming to your website to look at it and they could also see an error page, making your web site rank much, much lower – if at all.
Also, there are situations where you get a lot of search engines coming to your website to look at it and “spider” it. Doing that uses up bandwidth. Once in a while, this can go kind of crazy and a spider will kind of go crazy and use up a bunch of your available bandwidth. When that happens, you can try to tell that spider not to come but by then it might be too late. You don’t want your website to not appear because of a lack of bandwidth.
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