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Overview:

This document will assist you in deciding the amount of BANDWIDTH your website requires.

Getting Started:

Whati is bandwidth? Bandwidth is a measurement of how much information can be transmitted at a given time over the Internet.

For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.

Calculations:

Home Page html file = 3,500 bytes
line gif = 1, 500 bytes
green bullet gif = 500 bytes
blue bullet gif = 500 bytes
yellow bullet gif = 500 bytes
red bullet gif = 500 bytes
logo gif = 5,000 bytes

Total 22,000 bytes. If you average: 100 (hits to the page) x 22,000 (total bytes involved in downloading the page) minus 20 (20% of users with character-based browser or images off) x 18,500 (total bytes in the graphics files)
= 1,830,000 (bytes transferred; 1.83 megabytes)
1,830,000 (bytes transferred; 1.83 megabytes)
x
8 (number of bits in a byte)
= 14,640,000 (bits transferred; 14.46 megabits)

Is it 100 "page views" a day, a week or a month? And that is just for the home page. If you have a 100 page site, this can get pretty boring pretty quick, and if you have dynamic pages, you don't know what's going to get pulled until it does.

A site designer will generally add up the total size of all files and multiply that times the anticipated number of "visitors" to the site to get the projected bandwidth needed. This number is not very accurate (to say the least), but it gives the site maintainer something to work with until the site has been online for a while and actual traffic statistics have been generated.

After that, trends and patterns can be monitored with a very high level of accuracy. The Web10 plan offers 750 MB/month and The Web 25 plan accommodates 1GB of data transfer.

More Resources:

More information on bandwidth and anaylzing web statistics can be found at:

How to Analyze Your Web Logs
http://www.webtrends.com/services/suite/info.htm
http://www.webalyser.com