Hi,
I currently maintain about 15 websites and I'm constantly designing new ones. I know some of my sites have low traffic (less than 50 visitors daily) and some are fairly high (not one of mine has over 35,000 unique visitors per month).
When I choose a host package, Im not sure which one to pick when it comes to what bandwidth to choose. If my site has 200 visitors daily, how much bandwidth do I need? Please let me know by GigaBytes. I dont want to get a package with 10GB transfer if I have little traffic.

Example question:
6,000 monthly visitors = approx.? GB
30,000 monthly visitors = approx.? GB

Thanks

www.peddlerpost.com
www.freehotplays.com
www.umpirejoewest.com

It depends on what the site's content is. Text is small, graphics intensive site is more, pic galleries are even more, and last is movies. Plus, do you mean 35,000 uniques, which is not what you want to use for calculating bandwidth, or is it total impressions?

For example:
Your home page is 100K in graphics and text:
100,000 x 6,000= 600,000,000 or approx. 600MB in transfer
100,000 x 30,000= 3,000,000,000 or approx 3GB in transfer
That would be ONE page, not the whole site. Add about 10% more for overhead.

Do you have a log of your traffic? It will give you a good starting point.

However, some hosting companies use the 95% rule, which helps out those sites which receive a lot of usage in spurts. You pay for the average traffic used 95% of the time.

Whatever plan or host you decide to go with, you should make sure that you have the ability to upgrade (or, if possible, even downgrade). This way it gives you some time to see how well your site(s) are doing and you can adjust accordingly.

If you need to test out your site traffic I can offer you my Basic plan with 50% off the first month. So you wont be paying much.

http://reliant-web.com

I have 35, 000 unique visitors per month. So I shouldn't look at uniques, I should look at impressions? When you mean impressions, do u mean page views? What about flash...im sure that take up a lot of bandwidth huh? Many of my sites have flash, but not too much. Also, I should jpeg files over bitmap due to the size right?

www.peddlerpost.com
www.freehotplays.com
www.umpirejoewest.com

Some sites allow you to pay a little extra for more bandwidth - for example $0.50 for and extra 1 GB - so this could be a good idea!

Yes, look at your page views. The report that gave you page views also gives you amount of data transfered. Remember that you want a ball park, not an exact figure.
As far as flash goes... It's the size of the flash file x the number of times its downloaded. Jpg's are almost always better than bmp's, but remember they are BOTH bipmaps! Just a different way of storing the image.
So long as we're talking size, if you have several tiny graphic files that you can combine into a slightly larger one will actually save bandwidth due to overhead. For example, if you have a menu bar with 10 gifs next to each other all about 500 bytes each, it will be faster and use less bandwidth if you combine them all into a single 5K image!
Don't go crazy worrying too much about the bandwidth because it should be pretty cheap. Overall, try to get a plan that let's you pay for what you use and not pay extra for bandwidth you're not using.

hi

As you have seen that bandwidth calculation depend on the size of your pages as well as picture size and flash animations used.

in my idea you should take a VPS for your clients. Because you are a web designer and you will be needing more sites to host in future, So go for Virtual Private Server. These are east to maintain as well as full server in your hands.

That VPS sounds like a good idea, I cant believe I didnt know they existed.....anyway, are there any negative aspects about these VPS'? You just share your bandwidth with all your sites huh? Wouldn't it be much harder to determine your bandwidth for twenty websites as compared to one site? It seems as though they give you a lot of GB for the money.

Thanks everyone....

www.peddlerpost.com/replica_jewelry.htm
www.freehotplays.com
www.umpirejoewest.com