How to Determine the Web Hosting Resources Required for Your Website?

Estimating your exact need for web hosting resources is an important consideration if you are picking out your web hosting option. Purchase too much and you’ll end up wasting your money. In contrast, purchase too little and you’ll hemorrhage users due to your website shutting down for the rest of the month. In general, you are better off if you overestimate rather than underestimate your web hosting resource needs.

Calculating Your Need For Bandwidth

You’ll need to set up systems for monitoring the statistics of your website to properly calculate your need for bandwidth. Over time, you can use those statistics to make better and better guesses about your bandwidth, although you will always need to buy more bandwidth than what you actually need unless you are willing to risk your website becoming inaccessible.

• The basic formula for calculating your monthly bandwidth is your average daily bandwidth consumption multiplied by 31 for the number of days in a month. Your daily bandwidth consumption is estimated as the average number of visitors multiplied by their average page views which is in turn multiplied by the average size of your pages.
• If you are also offering downloads from your website, you’ll need to add the average number of daily downloads multiplied by the average size of those downloads to your previous calculation.
• Once you’ve finished estimating your monthly bandwidth requirement, you’ll need to multiply that figure by a margin of error such as the standard 1.5. You need the margin of error in case your estimate is flawed and it turns out that you needed more bandwidth than you had available. Of course, it is possible for you to overestimate rather than underestimate your needs, but that is not nearly as bad an outcome as having your website inaccessible for the rest of the month because you’ve used up your bandwidth.

Determining Your Need For Other Web Hosting Resources

Of course, bandwidth is not the only web hosting resource that you’ll need to estimate if you are looking into your web hosting options. Storage space is simple to estimate as the size of your website plus some additional space to allow for the growth of your website. However, the same is not true of RAM and CPU processing power.

The RAM and CPU processing power that is available to you depends on the web hosting option and the server computer that you are using. If you are using shared web hosting, you’ll have access to the server’s full resources so long as you are willing to share with all of the other users on the same server. In contrast, if you are using VPS, you’ll get a set amount of the server’s computing resources to yourself. On the other hand, dedicated hosting means that you get the full capabilities of the server but will need to pay significantly more to both acquire and maintain that server.

In general, you can estimate your RAM and computing process power requirements based on the software that you are planning to install and run on your server. This is not an issue for shared web hosting, but you’ll need to do a tally and then add some extra if you are planning on using either VPS or dedicated hosting.