Calculating your data transfer usage is a very important consideration in
setting up your web hosting package. Data transfer for your website is
calculated on a monthly basis, and would most likely vary from one month to the
next. The main factors that affect the data transfer are
- size of your web pages,
- number of hits for each
page, and
- your ftp traffic.
To understand this better, lets
take an example.
Suppose you have a site
containing 150 web pages of size 20 kb each, which is visited by 75 people
per day (all visitors go to all 150 pages). This would mean that the data transfer
is 150 x 20 kb x 75 = 225,000 kb per day or roughly 219 Mb per month.
Now suppose you have a
complex website with several hundred pages, each page of different size and
attracting a lot of visitors. Here, the pages that will attract maximum
traffic or for that matter the default page which will get uploaded for
every visitor needs to be considered while anticipating your data transfer.
Another factor to take into
consideration is the frequency at which you modify your website, since the data
uploads through FTP also add to your data transfer.
Moreover, it is a good idea to
regularly monitor your traffic and increase or decrease the data transfer limit
according to the data transfer reported in your web statistics.
