Hosting plans usually have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis. If your hosting plan offers 10GB per month that means that your web site is allowed to have the traffic amount of 10GB per month. How the traffic is created? Every time when someone visits your site traffic is created. In order to view the web page on your computer, the web page is first downloaded to your computer and is then displayed using your browser software. If the web page you're viewing is 100KB you've just created 100KB of traffic. But if you also downloaded a video clip which is 20MB you've created the traffic of 100KB+20MB. Uploading also creates traffic similarly. Note that downloading and uploading of images, vids and other data-rich content creates significant increase in traffic.
How much bandwidth you need?
Once again bandwidth as related to web hosting is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet community. A small or medium web site will consume between 1GB and 5GB of data transfer per month.
You can calculate how much bandwidth your site will need by multiplying your average page size with the number of expected page views per month. If your average page size is 70KB and you expect 50,000 page views per month, you will need 0.07MB x 50,000 = 3,5GB.
The more precise formula is:
Average Visitors per monthxAverage Page ViewsxAverage Page Sizexcorrective Factor
Average Visitors per month - The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, every month.
Average Page Views - The number of web pages you expect a person to view.
Average Page Size - The average size of your web pages. Be careful not to misplace KB with MB and vice versa.
corrective Factor - A number greater than 1. We recommend anywhere between 1.3-1.6. This factor allows you not to underestimate the traffic that might occur in connection with your site.
If your site contains some files to download you should add the amount of traffic created by downloading to the result of the above calculation. To calculate the traffic caused by downloading use following formula:
Average File Downloads per monthxAverage File Size
Average File Downloads - how many times the downloadable file is actually downloaded each month
Average File Size - Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site
