Hosting Bandwidth Calculator

What does this plugin do? This plugin calculates the amount of monthly hosting bandwidth you'll need for your site. How does it work? It takes the web page size (read from the URL given by the user), and with the user input for monthly page views, it then calculates the monthly hosting bandwidth needed. This is will be displayed as a sidebar widget. What is bandwidth? When referring to web hosting, bandwidth is the amount of allowable traffic between a particular site and the internet. The ISP determines the amount of allocated bandwidth by considering the type of connections coming into their servers and going out to the internet. The internet consists of networks that are connecting millions of computers. Available bandwidth is calculated according to the size of each connection. Each individual connection to an ISP is only one of potentially thousands. These combined connections to the ISP are then put through a larger (sometimes multiple) connection to the internet. The overall bandwidth has to be great enough to serve the needs of all of the clients. Bandwidth, measured in bits, are grouped in bytes to construct text and other information that's relayed between the computer and the internet. Every stored character is equivalent to one byte. One GB (Gigabyte) is the same as 1,024 megabytes; this is about the size of one full-length movie. Traffic refers to the total number of bits being transferred over the network connection at any given time. Comparable to highway traffic, the speed of data transfer on the internet is greatly dependent upon the amount of traffic generated by all users who are sharing the same connection. When there are many users transferring data at the same time, the traffic can become very slow to allow each client to perform transfers. Increasing the bandwidth broadens the internet highway and lets more traffic move faster. Whenever someone visits your site, it's considered traffic. The visited page is downloaded; it's simply a transferable file. The size of the file depends on the combined text, images, videos, audio, etc. The bandwidth for a site that doesn't offer any downloading to visitors can easily be determined with the following steps: Step 1 - Multiply the average number of daily visitors by the average number of page views. Step 2 - Multiply the above result by the average size of the page. Step 3 - Now multiply by 31. (This is based upon hosting plans offering Gigabytes (GB) of bandwidth per month. Step 4 - Multiply by what's known as the Fudge Factor. The Fudge Factor is based upon the assumption that any estimates or calculations of averages can be inaccurate. Multiplying by 2 or 3 should guarantee that there won't be any overcharges for bandwidth usage. The calculation is slightly amended when you intend to allow downloads by your visitors. This requires the following steps: Step 1 and Step 2 are the same as above. Step 3 - Multiply the average downloads of daily files by the average file size. Add this to the outcome of Step 2. Step 4 - Now multiply by 31. Step 5 - Multiply by the Fudge Factor. For those who like calculations made simple, Numion.com has some useful bandwidth calculators. It's good for unit conversion, calculating the optimum page size when building a site and determining the visitor load that can be handled with any particular size of bandwidth. The price is right, too. It's completely free.