Bandwidth calculator

Find out how much traffic a site or service moves in a month and how fast its port has to be at the busiest hour, then compare servers with that much traffic in the bill.

Start from
Traffic a month 0.49 TB About 16 GB a day.
Average speed
1.48 Mb/s
Busiest hour, about 3 × the average
4.45 Mb/s
Share of a 1 Gbit/s port at the busiest hour
0.44%

Servers ranked with 0.5 TB of traffic a month in the bill: where it costs extra, the overage is added before they are ordered. From €3.02 a month today, among 1,927 servers.

Servers with this traffic Unmetered only

Works in your browser: nothing you type is sent anywhere.

How it is calculated

Bandwidth bills count bytes, not visits. The calculator multiplies the pages people load by what a page weighs, then adds a share for what no visitor sees: search engine crawlers, bots, feeds, API calls and file downloads. That share is often a third of a small site’s traffic.

traffic a month = visitors × pages per visit × page size × (1 + extra)
average speed = traffic a month × 8 ÷ 2,629,800 seconds
busiest hour ≈ 3 × average speed
TB a month at a speed = Mbit/s × use × 2,629,800 ÷ 8 ÷ 1,000,000

Providers count traffic in decimal units (1 TB = 1,000 GB), usually outgoing traffic only, and reset the allowance each month. A month here is a twelfth of a year, 30.44 days.

Example

50,000 visitors a month, 3 pages each, 2.5 MB a page and 30% extra: 50,000 × 3 × 2.5 MB × 1.3 = 487.5 GB, about 0.49 TB a month. That averages 1.48 Mbit/s and peaks around 4.4 Mbit/s, a small fraction of any server’s port.

Questions

How much bandwidth does a website need?

Less than most plans include. A blog with 10,000 visitors a month moves well under 100 GB; a site with 100,000 visitors and heavy pages about 1 TB. Video, large downloads and backups to another server are what use several terabytes.

What is the difference between bandwidth and traffic?

Bandwidth is speed: how many bits per second the port can carry, such as 1 Gbit/s. Traffic, also called transfer, is volume: how many bytes went through it in a month, such as 2 TB. Hosting plans limit one or both.

How many TB a month is 1 Gbit/s?

A 1 Gbit/s port running flat out all month moves about 329 TB. 100 Mbit/s is about 33 TB, and 1 Mbit/s about 0.33 TB.

What does unmetered bandwidth mean?

That the provider does not count the bytes: you can use the port as much as its speed allows. It is still limited by the port speed and by a fair-use policy, so a 100 Mbit/s unmetered port can move about 33 TB a month at most.