When selecting a web hosting plan, one of the most important things that you will research is the amount of bandwidth that you should by as part of your hosting package. Bandwidth is simply the amount of data that flows between your website and your web host in a preset time limit, usually a month. Web site hosts buy bandwidth from wholesale bandwidth centers and then resell the bandwidth as part of web hosting packages.

Determining your bandwidth needs can be one of the most difficult decisions you make when setting up your web site. To determine your bandwidth needs, take the size of your finished web site and multiple that amount of data by the number of visitors that you expect to visit your site. For example, if your web site is 50 kilobytes and is viewed 20,000 times in a month, then you only need 1 gigabyte of bandwidth. If your site is personal or is devoted to your favorite site, that small amount of bandwidth is likely all you need.

If you offer downloads of music or video, then you will need much more bandwidth than is you just offered a static informational web site. Even smaller downloadable files can eat into your bandwidth allocation. If you offer a video clip that is one megabyte, you can only offer that site 1000 times before you have used your entire one gigabyte bandwidth budget. When you consider that the one megabyte file only offers a few seconds worth of video, you can see just how much bandwidth video files can consume from your hosting plan.

Most people who have their own web sites don't offer unlimited downloads of media files, so many webmasters use only a fraction of their purchased bandwidth. Many web hosting companies set up their plans in such a way that people will buy much more bandwidth than they need. In fact, if you began to use your full allotment each month, you would likely find your web hosting plan canceled without much notice. By using all of your bandwidth each month, you can strain your web host and pull resources from other customers. If you find yourself eating that much bandwidth, you might consider a dedicated server for your website. Of course, if you don't plan to have a site heavy with multimedia files, you shouldn't have to pay for a web hosting package with much more bandwidth than you need.

By taking a long look at your web site and knowing what you plan to offer, you can correctly estimate the amount of bandwidth you will need from your web hosting package. If you decide to host a number of videos, mp3 files or flash based applications, you should consider a dedicated server for your web site. If you are on a tight budget and your web site is small and unlikely to draw much traffic, you can save a significant amount of money by picking a web hosting package with smaller bandwidth allowances.