Choose data transfer quota for your new hosting

When you plan to run your online business, do you hesitate to choose data transfer quota in budget hosting account? What do you know its meaning? The data transfer quotas are major selling points for many web hosting customers. The available data transfer in web hosting plans is constantly increasing and it's hard to find 100 gigabytes monthly data transfer (one megabyte is 1024 kilobytes and one gigabyte is 1024 megabytes). But how do you find your new site would use how many bytes monthly data transfer? The 100 gigabytes monthly is enough?

So we need to calculate your website's size. First, let's suppose the size of every single page in your site is less 10 kbs, every single page will include web media (such as: images, css files, javascript files) less than 100 kbs. Cause the browser will cache the most of web media, so these are only transferred on the first page view. So the first page view from a visitor uses 110 kbs data transfer and the following page views takes another 10 kbs. If your site (total 50 pages) has 5000 page views a day, and 80% of them is new, the page impression is 10%, then we can calculate the average data transfer monthly:

transfer/day = (100 visits x 110 kbs) + 50 pages x 10% page impression x 10 kbs x 5000 pvs
= 11000 kbs + 25000kbs
= 36000 kbs

transfer/month = 35 mbs x 30 days = 1050 mbs = 1 gbs

With 5 000 monthly page views you will use 1 000 000 kbs. In the more relevant gb unit those numbers are 0.15 and 1.5. Add some heavy spider traffic and a light, popular website needs 2 gb monthly data transfer.

While the above estimates are partly based on real numbers, your reality can be different so keep your eyes open.
Your can enter your control panel to check your data transfer usage. A log analyzer like Awstats can also give valuable data about how the data tranfer is distributed between pages/file types/user agents etc. Then adjust your data transfer quota by real numbers.