When we learn to build or create our website, often there is warning that bandwidth (or the lack of) can break your website. This is true of course but again we need to look at the context for which it is given.

In short, there are different strokes for different folks.

If building websites can be likened to designing and building home improvements, then bandwidth is like opening your doors to visitors after the home improvements...except you cannot control the number of visitors coming to your home!

It is all well and good that we can use open source content management system to build our websites and the cost of hosting is reasonably fair. This is especially suitable for professional firms like lawyers. However is there enough bandwidth when our web home opens?

You can cleverly design your modest linked (web) home complete with (CMS) features/facilities like a barbeque section, an area for table-tennis, a small jacuzzi and a comfortable lounge area for cozy chit chats.

You invite your guests expecting 10 people but 200 people showed up at the door! This is a bandwidth nightmare.

Bandwidth should however be looked at under different context. To get a ball park feel for bandwidth, try this.

A page (all text) like this is about 10k. Do you think 100 pages of this page type is enough to define your site for (at least) initial period? That means your site totals about 1mb (100pages of 10K each).

How many Gbs do you have in a month? Say 3gb per month. Take this number divide by 30. You have 100mb bandwidth per day.

Assuming each visitor visits every page on your site. This means your web home can take about 100 visitors (100mb bandwidth divide by website 1mb) per day.

If each visitor only visits half number of (50) pages, then you can take up to 200 daily visitors. If each visitor only checkout 10 pages, then your site can take up to 1000 visitors per day.

1000 visitors a day and each views 10 pages is actually a very high number. It means there are 10,000 page views daily or 3.65million page views a year. As an indication, Malaysia Central, the leading online information resource relied upon by tens of thousands Malaysians daily, recorded over 20 million page views last year.

In reality, most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month.

Just be a bit more careful if we have image files as this takes up more bytes.