When hiring a hosting to host our website, different factors must be taken into account. Some points are vital for the site to load well, that there are no problems and that, ultimately, we offer an adequate service to visitors. Hence, you have to know some fundamental terms. In this article we explain what the monthly transfer is .
What is the monthly transfer in a web hosting
The monthly transfer of a web hosting is also known as monthly traffic. Basically it is the amount of information that our server can transfer during that period of time. This includes the use of a website (data received and sent) and email.
As we can imagine, the more visits we receive on our site, the more monthly traffic consumption there will be. A page that receives just 100 visits a day is not the same as another that receives 10,000.
Another issue to take into account is that not only the visits themselves influence, but also the pages that we have and the content hosted. At the end of the day we are sending and receiving information with each visit and it is not the same if it is only a page with text than another that contains images and videos, for example.
The use of the FTP system , to upload content to our site, will also influence this monthly transfer. If, for example, we load a large number of images at once, all that influences. The same as if we have a file hosted and visitors download it.
How much monthly transfer does a website need
We have seen what is the monthly transfer or monthly traffic. However, as we have explained, the amount that we have contracted will depend a lot on the type of web page that we are using.
In summary we can say that a personal blog is not the same, where we are going to publish articles talking about a specific topic and that it will not have many visits nor do we expect users to download large content since we will not host photos or videos, we would not need more than a basic monthly transfer.
On the other hand, if we have an e-commerce website, where we are going to upload many images, many sections, many visits as well, we will need a larger transfer. Each complement, each photograph that we have, will make it necessary to have a higher monthly traffic.
To make an approximate calculation of the monthly transfer that we need, we must know an estimate of the monthly visits that we are going to have, as well as the average weight of a page on our site.
Let’s say that on average a page of our site occupies 100 KB. If we are going to receive 1,000 visits per day (1,000 page views) it means that we are going to consume approximately 100 MB. If we spend that amount to the whole month, it would be 3,000 MB, or what is the same, almost 3 GB.
Logically this is an approximate amount , simply by making a quick calculation based on the estimated number of visits that we are going to receive, as well as the size of the pages. This will depend a lot on the content we host, if we have a website that at certain times can receive many more visits, etc.
You have to be prepared and have an adequate monthly transfer to support visits to our site. Normally, the hosting we use will allow us to have a certain flexibility, precisely to avoid that in a month there are many more visits at once and we have problems offering a good service.
How to know the monthly transfer we have and the amount consumed
This will depend on the hosting we have contracted, but generally this information is shown to us visually on the server’s user panel . There we can see both the monthly transfer that we have contracted (normally measured in GB), as well as how much we have consumed so far this month.
It usually appears in a section called Bandwidth . There will come that information in a simplified way, as well as more detailed once we enter the data. We can see, for example, the monthly transfer consumption on that specific day, as well as the previous days or weeks.
We can also see which part of our website has consumed the most. This is useful if we want to reduce monthly traffic and for example we see that a certain page contains videos or images and is consuming a lot.