“Data transfer” (also referred to as “bandwidth”) refers to the amount of data that is transferred to and from your web hosting account on our server. This occurs when visitors access your website, and view or download various pages, graphics, or other files.
Using FTP to upload files to your site does not apply in this case, since we do not calculate FTP into your data transfer usage. Also, checking your email does not deduct from your monthly data transfer limits.
Because every website is different, the file sizes and overall website size can vary greatly. Also, each visitor entering your website may download a different amount of data from your website. For example: Visitor-A might visit only your homepage, which is a small file of only 10KB in size; Visitor-B, meanwhile, views every page in your website and downloads 3 large video files, making their entire session worth 500KB of data. As you can see, there is no exact way to predict how many unique visitors will be able to visit your website every month. However, you can practice some estimating methods that will help you to determine if your current plan limits are right for your website.
One way that you can roughly estimate how many files your site can transfer per month is calculated using average visitor activity and average file size. This is done as follows:
(Average number of visitors per month) X (Average page/file size) X (Average page/file views) = Average Data Transfer usage per month
Keep in mind that the size of your average page/file should take into consideration any downloadable files, such as video or music samples. (A web page with text and graphics alone might only be 30KB in size, but including the popular mp3 files on that page, the total size may be 430 KB.)
For example:
You have an online music store. The average size of a page on your site is 450KB, which includes a music sample mp3 file. You determine that you expect 10,000 visitors per month and that each visitor will visit an average of 2 pages. This calculates as follows:
10,000 visitors/mo. X 450KB average page size X 2 average page views = 9,000,000KB
This roughly translates to 9000MB per month.
Although this method cannot predict the exact number of unique visitors who will be able to visit your website each month, it gives you an average estimate of what to expect from your website, based on its particular file sizes and estimated traffic. Another tool, which is a great asset to our current customers, is the site statistics tool, available with all shared hosting accounts.
Our detailed site statistics allow webmasters to constantly evaluate the activity of their website, which may assist them in determining need for additional data transfer. In cases where a website has increased in popularity, statistics values will increase, signaling to the webmaster that it may be time for an account upgrade. This often occurs when you increase your website’s visibility through marketing or search engine indexing.
Also, the convenient data transfer metrics located in the site statistics area of the cPanel Control Panel allow webmasters to monitor the amount of data transfer usage their site has recently experienced. The right column on your cPanel dashboard provides a summary of resource usage, while there are deeper site usage statistics available as well.
In our experience, adult content websites, corporate websites, websites with significant downloadable audio and/or video files, and high-traffic websites, may require a greater amount of data transfer allowance per month.
Additional data transfer may also be purchased a la carte, in blocks of 1000MB/month (10GB/month).
For more assistance in choosing the right plan type for your new web hosting account, feel free to email our sales department.