Your should never under estimate the amount of bandwidth required for your site. Bandwidth is the quantity of data that will be viewed by the visitors to your site. If you do not allow for enough bandwidth, you could find that your bill could rocket sky high.
Bandwidth aka data transfer is measured by your web host as the total amount of data that has been viewed by your site visitors; this figure is usually shown in gigabytes.
Byte Conversion
1KB is 1024 bytes
1MB is 1,048,576 bytes
1Gig is 1,073,741,824 bytes
Your charges will depend on the amount of bandwidth you use in a month, which will include all outward and inward bound traffic, email and anonymous FTP aka file transfer protocol traffic.
Anonymous FTP traffic means visitors that visit your site will be able to view or copy files with out having to log in to an account, so can remain anonymous. Most sites do not allow anonymous FTP access for security reasons or some may require the visitors email address as a courtesy to the site owner.
How much bandwidth will I need?
It can be a little difficult to guess how much bandwidth you will need, one of the factors being what type of site you will host.
For instance if you are selling software with a free demonstration download, depending on the amount of visitors requesting this, you are likely to need a larger bandwidth. For instance if your free download was 1.5 Meg's for 10,000 downloads, you would need at least 15GB of bandwidth.
As a rough guess, if an average visitor wants to view a megabyte of data and you feel that you may have five thousand visitors in one month, then you will use five gigabytes of bandwidth.
Just bear in mind that every time a page, image etc is viewed by your visitor, this will be traffic generated so if you have a 50kb image on your page this will be counted every time it is requested from the server.
There are Web hosting companies that offer “unlimited” transfer, do be aware that as bandwidth is expensive,it is unlikely to be true. Check all of the “small print”, any web host worth their salt will explain the transfer limit.
Some Web hosts state that you must qualify for unlimited bandwidth, in other words if you only use up to a certain amount of gigabytes per month. Once you go over their specified allocation, you will no longer qualify. Which could mean extra charges or site removal.
Other Web hosts may offer unlimited bandwidth, but not allow you to offer certain file types other than normal HTML and graphics.
The bottom line is, if you go over your bandwidth limit, it could render your site inaccessible or put your charges up significantly.
