How Much Bandwidth for Your WordPress Website?

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson from WordPress Web Design For Dummies

When it comes to bandwidth and hard drive space for website hosting, take into consideration what type of website you’re building. Whether designing for yourself or a client, plan ahead to avoid potential problems down the road.

Plan for future WordPress website needs

Different types of websites use more bandwidth, hard drive space, and server resources than others. Take into consideration the type of traffic the website gets now as well as how much you expect it to get over the course of the next several months.

When you think about building additional features on your site, consider the amount of hard drive space (storage) you’ll need to store the files and data, and the amount of traffic (bandwidth) required to manage it. For example, a photo gallery or portfolio will require storage for large image files and a good amount of bandwidth to handle the transfer of the large image files from your web server to your visitor’s browser; therefore, be sure to consider that when calculating hard drive storage space and bandwidth.

If you want to build a social community, there are several other factors to take into consideration because the traffic of your community members will be much more regular. And if you set up the community to allow members to share photos and videos and participate in discussion forums, the hard drive space needed to do that will increase by quite a lot.

Know your site and develop a plan to make sure you have the hosting requirements accounted for and in place — they’ll save you many headaches down the road.

Careful with offers of unlimited space and bandwidth

A lot of hosting providers are out there, and it’s an extremely competitive market. Use caution with hosting providers that offer unlimited packages, though. Basically, for a certain cost per month, you get unlimited bandwidth transfer and unlimited hard drive space (along with unlimited domains, databases . . . pretty much unlimited everything!).

This isn’t to say that the hosts that do this aren’t good ones. But, there is a popular school of thought that there’s no such thing as unlimited. When you encounter these offers, read the hosting provider’s terms of service. Pay particular attention to what they have to say about server resources, or more specifically, CPU resource usage.

Although these hosting providers may offer unlimited transfer and hard drive space, if your website gets a traffic spike, the CPU resource usage goes up, and many hosts will turn off your website temporarily, until the CPU resource use goes down. This generally means that you lose all that traffic that probably caused the rise in CPU resource usage to begin with.

If you see an unlimited offer that looks good to you, pursue it. Just be sure to investigate a bit and ask the right questions, such as “What are the CPU limitations for my account, and what happens if I exceed them?”