The term bandwidth (or transfer) refers to the rate at which a certain amount of data can be transferred from your website account within a specific time. The “strength” of your bandwidth affects the speed and efficiency of your website but it does not affect the number of “hits”. Data transfer is generated every time a web page is accessed. A single hit to a 100 KB web page uses the same amount of bandwidth as 100 hits to a 1 KB web page. Beware of hosting services offering a certain amount of “hits”. Transfer allotment is what you should pay attention to as all packages have a bandwidth limit. The amount of bandwidth used is determined by the size of the files being delivered from the web site and the number of visitors to the site. Typically, a 50 KB web page is a good target page as it could be downloaded for viewing almost 21,000 times before using 1 GB of bandwidth.
A small- or medium-sized web site will use up between 1 GB and 5 GB of data transfer per month.
To calculate the amount of transfer you will need, multiply an average page size by the number of expected page views per month.
For example: if your average page size is 30 KB and you expect 50,000 page views per month, you will need 0.03 MB x 50,000 = 1.5 GB of transfer.
More sizeable, commercial sites can consume more than 100 GB of monthly traffic.
Make sure to know your hosting needs before selecting the appropriate hosting package.
