What Is Monthly Bandwidth in Web Hosting?

When you visit a website that loads slowly, you may wonder why your internet is not moving quickly. Not all websites are created equally when it pertains to hosting speeds. Learn what monthly bandwidth in web hosting is and, more importantly, how to determine what your bandwidth usage is and the different types of bandwidth.

We will also review some of the best web hosting providers based on our research and answer frequently asked questions.

Key takeaways:

• What bandwidth is and its importance
• Types of bandwidth
• How to calculate your bandwidth needs
• The best web hosting providers based on bandwidth

What Is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred in a given amount of time, like water running through a hose. The larger the hose, the more water you can provide. This applies to hosting providers and your website. To deliver your content to the end users, all that data must be sent down that water hose to the requesting user. If a website loads slowly, a bandwidth plan may have been superseded due to a high volume of users trying to load content on your website.

It is crucial to understand how much bandwidth, on average, your website is using and how many visitors in a given period go to your site. Knowing this helps you select a web hosting plan that suffices for day-to-day browsing and gives your website a buffer in case of an uptick in traffic.

What Are the Best Web Host Bandwidth Providers?

These top-rated web hosts offer generous bandwidth at a fair price so you can balance performance with cost.

Why Is Bandwidth Important in Web Hosting?

Bandwidth determines how much data can be transmitted over a network. The greater the bandwidth, the more responsive network can be. Knowing the speed at which files can be downloaded is critical when utilizing the fastest loading speeds and managing operating costs. So not having a solid understanding of your bandwidth metrics puts you in a very expensive bind.

Lacking enough bandwidth brings your site down, thus costing you possible revenue. But having too much incurs a costlier monthly premium. Web hosting providers charge monthly for specific bandwidth speeds as there is wear and tear with more activity on your web hosting servers. Ensuring they remain up and running takes many resources, personnel hours, and money to maintain those data centers.

What is data transfer?

It is important to understand the difference between bandwidth and data transfer when viewing bandwidth plan options to fully comprehend which hosting plan you need to subscribe to.

Data transfer is the amount of actual data transferred from your site, used up when images or videos are loaded on your websites or files downloaded. If your hosting plan provides high bandwidth usage but a low data transfer rate, your website may be down often.

Types of network bandwidth

The different types of network bandwidth are used for various purposes and are unique in performance, speed, and cost to utilize. Learn the key differences and understand which types are most likely associated with website hosting.

Public wireless (4G LTE Mobile)

Public wireless primarily belongs to the mobile device space. The Long-Term Evolution (LTE) tends to be more expensive as it requires limited cellular towers to carry the signal. Different speeds are tied to public wireless bandwidth. 3G, 4G, and 5G are all examples of public wireless, bringing more bandwidth to compatible devices.

Public broadband

Public broadband bandwidth is the most commonly used as it involves centralized cabling stretched out across vast distances to provide internet. There are three types:

• Digital subscriber line (DSL): lower end speeds, usually run through telephone lines
• Cable: midrange speeds through dedicated cable line
• Fiber optic: fastest delivering GB speeds on fiber optic cable lines

Private networks

These are reserved for high-paying customers. Usually, businesses or governments participate in having their own secure personal internet contracts, which can be pricey and lengthy but offer the highest level of speeds (100GB or more in some areas). Companies setting up their own software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) usually directly agree with several Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to have a dedicated internet pipeline.

What is unlimited bandwidth?

Be careful when jumping into a web hosting plan that offers unlimited bandwidth, as there is no such thing. It is essential you fully understand your website’s performance requirements.

Web hosting providers have physical servers to maintain, which have a limit.

The term unlimited bandwidth is a selling tactic to draw in unaware individuals or those new to web hosting. While the unlimited bandwidth sales tactic is not always a bad thing, you do need to be careful Some hosting companies are providing just enough bandwidth hoping people won’t notice it is not unlimited. Every web hosting provider should have some policies around what exactly constitutes unlimited. This must be researched to avoid potential bandwidth reduction or overage charges if too much bandwidth is used.

How Do You Calculate Your Bandwidth Needs?

Before selecting a web hosting provider, determine how much bandwidth you will need. In most cases, you will be able to look up exactly how much bandwidth your site is using through your admin panel.

If you don’t see the precise bandwidth usage, or you haven’t yet launched your website, you can get a rough estimate by gathering the following bits of information from your site:

• Average page size
• Expected average monthly visitors
• Expected average daily visitors
• Expected average page views
• Redundancy

Once you have done the above metrics, multiply all five together to obtain your bandwidth. On average, most website pages are around 3MB. If your bandwidth is higher than expected, assess the amount of high-volume content stored directly on your websites. For example, if you have files stored on your website for direct download, that is a lot of data transmitted each time someone clicks to download. Instead of displaying videos directly on your site, insert a hyperlink to another site displaying that video.

How do you check bandwidth usage?

There are several ways to monitor your bandwidth usage. You can check with your hosting provider to see if it has a way to gauge bandwidth usage from the website’s admin channel. Also, you can check your live usage on certain web browsers.

We’ll use Google Chrome to show you how:

• To start, right-click and “inspect this page” or press F12
• On the side menu with several different tabs, navigate to the network tab
• Refresh the browser page you want to monitor on your website
• In the lower right corner, you will see all the following metrics regarding your speeds:
  • Bytes transferred
  • Requests made
  • Size of each request
  • Time each took (down to the millisecond)

The second method is the easiest way to check bandwidth performance on any page in a few clicks. You can easily capture your screen for documentation for tracking.