How much bandwidth and space is needed to host your website?

Are you planning to host your personal website and trying to find how much of space and bandwidth is needed to host your website? This mini tutorial will help you calculate how much of those resource is needed.

Let’s start with determining the space that will be needed to host your website. Almost all websites consists of various files such as html, jpg, txt, zip etc. If your website is already designed, calculating how much of space it will take to host it on a server is quite easy. Just place all the files in their respective folders on your hard disk and then right click to find the size of the main folder that contains all the files of your website. That’s it! That’s exactly the space you will need on the server where you wish to your host your website.

Let’s now see how to find the bandwidth you will need on a monthly basis. Although most of the hosting packages offer plenty of bandwidth now a days, in fact much more than what most of us actually need, we will still look at the formula to calculate the estimated total bandwidth consumption every month.

The formula is actually quite simple, here it is.

[total size of all the files of your website including graphics] x [number of visitors everyday x number of pages each visitor will view] x [number of days in a month, i.e. 30 in our case] = Total monthly bandwidth required

Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose, you have a website that consists of 10 html pages and 2 images. All the html pages put together is 100KB and 2 images are 100KB in total. Your site might get 100 visitors every day and each visitor might see 2 pages of your site, then using the formula we arrive at the monthly bandwidth required.

[ 200KB ] x [ 100 x 2 ] x [ 30 ] = 1200000 KB which is ~ 1.2GB of bandwidth

In the formula mentioned above, the total size of the files can be replaced with average size of the files and you will still be able to calculate estimate bandwidth. However, one thing to remember is that browsers cache static content such as html pages and graphics files, so your actual bandwidth required may be less if there are a lot of repeat visitors.