A crucial factor before considering a web hosting package is to determine your requirements for your website. There are various aspects that one needs to consider but we’ll get into that later during our blog series. One crucial factor worth considering is bandwidth. An important step in the process is to calculate the amount of bandwidth required for your website.
Majority of web hosting companies list their bandwidth quota in the specifications list. The bandwidth range varies from package to package. The higher the package, the more bandwidth will be provided.
What is bandwidth when it comes to web hosting?
Bandwidth speed is considered as the maximum amount of data that can be transferred over an internet connection at a given time. Bandwidth shouldn’t be confused with data transfer. Although, similar in context the terms are different due to the fact that bandwidth refers to the amount of data transferred within a time frame. The emphasis is on time frame and not necessarily by the amount of data that can be transferred. Bandwidth is measured in GB/s (Gigabytes per second) or MB/s (Megabytes per second)
Factors for determining your bandwidth requirements
Bandwidth plays a role in the loading time of your website. Due to statistics, users normally leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. If you are an owner of an e-commerce business, your site’s speed can affect a potential shopper’s interest or attention span. This can affect the decision making process of shopper leading up to a sale. Each task that’s completed in your network requires network bandwidth. Preparing your bandwidth requirements from a service provider entails the following factors below. The factors mentioned below serves as a guideline as to what to look for before considering a hosting package.
Monthly visitors
You should keep track of the monthly visitors to measure your website’s threshold. You can track your visitors via Google Analytics or WordPress metrics tracker.
Page views
In terms of page views, you need to find out how many pages a visitor opens when they visit your website.
Webpage size
Finding your web page size can be done by using online tools such as GTMetrix or Pingdom. The type of content being displayed and the richness can be another factor affecting your bandwidth requirements. If you have high quality imagery, videos and
How you will be using it
An important factor that needs to be considered is how the bandwidth will be used. An individual might use 1Mbps whereas the other could stream videos in 4k where it would take much more data.
Ideally, a hosting plan that offers 50% more than your current bandwidth. This will allow for much needed room to do a little extra than what you usually could do with your previous package.
How to check your bandwidth using cPanel
Once you have logged into your cPanel account, on the right hand side, there is a panel that will display your data. Under the statistics section, you can check your bandwidth usage or one could type the phrase ‘bandwidth’ into the search bar.
Another method of checking for bandwidth usage would be to log into your account and scroll down to the metrics section on the page.
At Hostking, there would be no need to be concerned about your bandwidth limit. Our WordPress hostking and cPanel hosting plans offers unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth can be a confusing topic to grasp at first. If there’s any further clarification needed, our support team is available right throughout to provide guidance.