How much bandwidth is enough?

Published on July 31, 2011 How much bandwidth is enough?

Many of the differences between the shopping cart software packages of any provider are the disk space provided and the bandwidth. How do you know you have the right package?

If you already have an ecommerce website, then you can work out the amount of disk space and bandwidth you have used in one of two ways:

• Through your online shop’s admin panel (if the store software supports it)
• Through your website’s cPanel or Plesk hosting control panel (if you have access to it). There are options in both hosting control panels to view disk space and bandwidth usage.

If neither of these apply, you’ll need to contact your website host and ask them how much you have used.

How much is enough?

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules here.

The amount you use depends on how many products you edit yourself, how many products you upload or download, what your customers do, and the volume of emails you send/receive each month.

As most product descriptions are stored as text and take up little room on your website per product, the main determinant of how much disk space and bandwidth you will need depends on the number of images that you have for your products.

Every time someone accesses a page on your website, the browser communicates with the website’s server. Some servers allow browsers to cache images to reduce the number of times they are downloaded from the server and whether this occurs depends on the type of browser that you have and the website’s server.

Here’s one quick way of calculating an example:

– you download the image from the server more than it’s read from the cache
– product images are approx 50-70kb each
– there are approx 1-3 images per product
– image sizes are approx 1024 x 768 kb in size
– each site visitor may view on average 5 products per day
– each page on the site has about 30kb of other content in addition to the products and text displayed
– an allowance of 1GB for extra emails and admin traffic (e.g., uploading images)

You would be looking at this:

bandwidth = number of monthly visitors x 3 x 90 x 5 + 1GB

For example, in a store with 30 visitors per day:

bandwidth = (30 x 30) x 3 x 100kb x 5 (+ 1GB) = 1,350,000kb (+ 1GB)
bandwidth = 1GB = 1.4 + 1 Gigabytes
= 2.4GB

So even if you make an extra gigabyte allowance for emails, and admin usage, you’re still well under the 6GB of monthly traffic that is offered on even our lowest ecommerce pricing package and receiving 30 visitors a day viewing 5 products each. In our experience, few customers use more than 2GB of traffic in a month, especially when they’re getting started.

So if your hosting provider has an upgrade path, then there’s no need to over-pay for a package that includes unlimited hosting – you’re effectively paying extra for the fact that only a few people ever use their limits: a bit like the way insurance works.