I'm truly grateful to @Joseinnewworld for once again showing incredible support by collecting more of my #NFTs — just a few days after his last spree. Your appreciation means the world. Thank you 🙏 #NFTcollector #SupportMeansEverything #eCash $XEC #CryptoNews https://t.co/e3DjXUeNDf pic.twitter.com/Ef1X34w0dv
— NFToa (@nftoa_) June 24, 2025
You want as many people as possible to visit your website.
If all those visitors are to have a good experience, you need bandwidth and lots of it.
Here's why:
Your website is made up of text, images, and lots of lines of code. All of that is called your website data, and when someone visits your site, you have to send all of that data to their computer or mobile device.
Technically, the term bandwidth refers to the speed at which data is transferred over a computer network. However, in the context of web hosting plans, it’s easier to think of it as your cell phone plan. You might have a phone plan that allows you to use a certain amount of data, or, you might have what’s called an “unlimited” plan. Your web hosting bandwidth is very similar, except, instead of affecting your cell phone usage, it controls how much data your website can send.
Depending on the content of your site, that can be a lot of data.
For example, the YouTube homepage is 2 megabytes (MB) in size.
If ten people are accessing it, YouTube needs to have 20 MB of bandwidth to deliver its homepage to them. Without enough bandwidth, YouTube won't be able to deliver its homepage to anyone, which means no one will be able to access their website to watch videos.
The same goes for your site.
If you don’t have enough bandwidth in your hosting package, many of your visitors won’t be able to access your website. That means you’ll be missing out on a lot of valuable traffic.
In this article, we will show you:
- Why you need high bandwidth for your website.
- How to calculate your bandwidth requirements accurately.
- How to choose a hosting package with the right amount of bandwidth.
- Let's start.
Why You Need Lots of Bandwidth
We’ve covered what bandwidth is, so you know that it’s absolutely essential if people want to be able to access your site. But why is it important to have plenty of it?
Here are three important reasons why you should have plenty of bandwidth in your hosting package:
Your website can have more media elements:
If you have limited bandwidth, you won’t be able to send your website to many people, especially if your website has a lot of images, videos, and animations. However, if you have high bandwidth, you can add as much content to your website as you want without having to worry about reaching your bandwidth limit.
Your website will be less likely to crash:
Let’s say your plan provides bandwidth to support a thousand visitors, but one month, you get five thousand. Because of the lack of bandwidth, most of those five thousand visitors won’t be able to access your website. That’s a great reason to have more bandwidth—if your site experiences a spike in traffic, everyone will be able to access it.
Your visitors can see more of your website pages:
If you are building a website that frequently has new web pages, such as blog posts and product pages, you should get a hosting plan with a large bandwidth. If you do, your visitors will be able to access all of those new pages.
How to Calculate Your Bandwidth Needs
If you have just launched your website and do not have many visitors yet, you do not need to calculate bandwidth requirements. Until your audience grows, a basic hosting package is enough for you.
On the other hand, if you have reached the bandwidth limit of your current hosting plan, and you want to upgrade to a new plan or migrate to another hosting provider, you need to know exactly how much bandwidth you need.
It's easy to figure out, but first, there's one thing you need to remember: your provider will track your bandwidth, keeping track of how much data your website has sent.
Every hosting plan will have some sort of bandwidth limit, and you will be getting closer to that limit every time someone visits your website.
So, here's how you can calculate your bandwidth requirements in three simple steps:
Step 1 – Check how many monthly visitors your website gets. This information is easy to find in your WordPress dashboard or Google Analytics.
Step 2 – Check the average number of page views per visitor. Again, in your Google Analytics or WordPress dashboard, you can see how many pages the average person opens when they visit your website.
Step 3 – Calculate the average web page size on your site. You can use a tool like Pingdom to find out the web page size of your site. Check as many pages as possible to get a more accurate average.
If you have all three numbers, just multiply them, like this:
monthly website visitors x average page views x average web page size
For example, if you get 5,000 visitors per month, with the average visitor opening about 3 web pages, and each web page being about 2 MB in size, this means your bandwidth usage is:
5,000 x 3 x 2 = 25,000 MB, or 25 GB per month.
By estimating your bandwidth usage in this way, you can predict your future bandwidth needs.
You should purchase a hosting plan that offers at least 50% more bandwidth than you currently need. This will give you room to add more content to your website and handle more traffic spikes when your site suddenly becomes popular.
So, in short, the more bandwidth you have, the richer content and traffic your site can support.
Choosing a Hosting Package with the Right Amount of Bandwidth
When you review the hosting packages offered by most providers, you will find that you can choose from different types of bandwidth packages. Metered bandwidth has strict limits. For example, if you get 10 GB of metered bandwidth in your hosting package, that means you cannot exceed that limit by a single byte.
But some plans don’t cap your bandwidth , giving you more flexibility. If you plan to use 10 GB of bandwidth, for example, but you go over your estimate, using 15 GB or 20 GB, that’s fine. While, in theory, these plans allow you to use as much bandwidth as you want, there is an upper limit. You should ask your hosting provider what that limit is.
Most hosting providers offer plenty of bandwidth on all of their plans, so you likely won't have to choose.
Instead, the decision you have to make is between shared hosting and VPS.
These are two types of hosting services with very different bandwidth limitations. Here's a quick breakdown of each:
- Shared hosting: In a shared hosting environment, your website shares resources with other websites. This means you will share bandwidth, disk space, processing power, and more. If you are just starting out, or if your website does not get much traffic, a shared hosting service will be a good choice.
- VPS: A virtual private server, or VPS, is a hosting service that gives you dedicated resources that only your website can use. While generally more expensive than shared hosting, the upside is that you get a much more powerful and secure hosting package with much greater bandwidth.
If you choose a VPS service, you will get bandwidth starting from 1 TB (1,000 GB). You may need that kind of bandwidth if any of the following applies to you:
- You run multiple websites with heavy traffic.
- Your site gets over a million visitors per month.
- You have a very content-heavy site (such as an eCommerce store or news site).
- This scenario usually requires site owners to purchase a VPS hosting plan to meet their bandwidth needs.
As mentioned, if you are just starting out, say, with less than 50,000 visitors per month, a shared hosting plan will give you enough bandwidth.
Ultimately, we recommend that you don’t put too much emphasis on bandwidth. Not because it’s not an important factor, but because it’s very easy to upgrade or downgrade your hosting plan as your bandwidth needs change over time.
Have you done any planning for your bandwidth usage? Let us know in the comments below.