How Much Hosting Do I Need? Bandwidth, Storage, Memory

You can size hosting with three sums: monthly bandwidth, storage, and how many pages your server has to build at the same moment. For most small Bangladeshi sites the answer is smaller than people fear. A school website comes to about 27 GB of bandwidth a month and 9 GB of storage. A WooCommerce clothing shop comes to about 90 GB and 10 GB. What usually decides the plan is not the monthly total but the rush: how many people arrive in the same few minutes.

If you would rather answer a few questions, the plan finder matches your answers to a plan.

How do I calculate bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the total data your server sends out in a month. The sum is:

Visitors per month × pages per visit × page weight

So 10,000 visitors viewing 3 pages at 2 MB each comes to 10,000 × 3 × 2 = 60,000 MB, or 60 GB. We round 1 GB to 1,000 MB to keep the arithmetic easy.

• Visitors and pages: take them from Google Analytics or your host's statistics. With no site yet, estimate from your Facebook reach or walk-in customers.
• Page weight: open a typical page in Chrome, press F12, open the Network tab and reload. The figure beside transferred at the bottom is the weight.
• Margin: add 50%. Bots, your own admin work and busy days all use bandwidth the formula does not see.

How much storage does a website need?

Add up what actually sits on the disk:

• Site files: WordPress with a theme and plugins is usually around 1 GB.
• Images and documents: count × average size. WordPress saves several sizes of every photo you upload, so allow for that.
• Database: small for a blog, and it grows steadily with orders or articles.
• Email: on most hosts, mailboxes share the same disk as the site.
• Backups left on the server: each one is a full copy of the site. Keep your main copy off the server.

Then divide the total by 0.7. A disk that stays around 70% full leaves room for updates and backups to run.

How much RAM and CPU does a website need?

A plain HTML page needs almost nothing. A PHP site such as WordPress builds each page when someone asks for it, and that page holds memory and a share of a CPU core until it finishes. So:

Memory = pages being built at once × memory per page

As working figures, allow about 64 MB per page for ordinary WordPress and 128 MB for WooCommerce. When more pages run at once than you have CPU cores, they take turns and the site slows down. That leaves one question: how many is "at once"?

What are entry processes in hosting?

Think of a bank counter. An entry process is one person being served at the counter right now. It is not your visitors per day. A branch with three counters can serve thousands of people a month, because they do not all arrive together.

At the counter = pages requested per second × seconds to build one page

Take 30,000 visitors a month viewing 3 pages each, which is 90,000 pages. Spread over 30 days and 12 busy hours a day (43,200 seconds), that is 90,000 ÷ 30 ÷ 43,200 = about 0.07 pages a second. If a page takes one second to build, the counter is empty most of the time. The number only climbs in a rush.

To measure yours, click the page in the Network tab and read Waiting for server response under Timing.

When the limit is reached, the next visitor gets an error such as 503 or 508 rather than a slower page, and the error clears once the rush passes. A cached page needs no PHP, so it leaves the counter almost at once. Caching is the easiest way to bring this number down.

What does the I/O limit mean?

I/O is how fast your account may read from and write to the disk. In the bank picture, it is the width of the storeroom door: however hurried the staff, files only come through so fast. You feel it when restoring a backup, importing a large database, or running a heavy site with no cache. Reaching it usually slows the site rather than showing an error.

Three worked examples from Bangladesh

The traffic figures below are assumptions, so swap in your own. Each example adds 50% to bandwidth, divides storage by 0.7, and assumes one second to build an ordinary page.

A school website

Notices, results, admission forms and a photo gallery. Teachers use school email.

• Bandwidth: 3,000 visitors × 4 pages × 1.5 MB = 18 GB. With the margin, 27 GB.
• Storage: 1 GB site + 1 GB PDFs and photos + 4 GB email (20 mailboxes × 200 MB) = 6 GB. Divided by 0.7, about 9 GB.
• Rush: on results day, 500 parents arrive in 5 minutes and view 2 pages each. 1,000 pages ÷ 300 seconds = 3.3 a second, so about 4 at the counter. Memory: 4 × 64 MB = 256 MB.

Start with the Web Hosting table below. Storage decides it here, mostly because of the email.

A Facebook clothing shop moving to WooCommerce

Orders used to come through the inbox. Now there are 300 products on a real site, 5 photos each.

• Bandwidth: 10,000 visitors × 5 pages × 2.5 MB = 125 GB. Phone photos make those pages heavy. Compress them to bring a page down to 1.2 MB and it falls to 60 GB, or 90 GB with the margin.
• Storage: 300 products × 5 photos × 0.6 MB (each photo plus the sizes WooCommerce generates) = 900 MB. Add 1 GB of site files and 0.5 GB of database for 2.4 GB. Two backup copies on the server take it to 7.2 GB. Divided by 0.7, about 10 GB.
• Rush: a Facebook Live sends 300 people in 5 minutes, viewing 4 pages each. 1,200 ÷ 300 = 4 a second. Cart and checkout cannot be cached, so allow 1.5 seconds a page: 6 at the counter. Memory: 6 × 128 MB = 768 MB.

The rush is what can hurt here, because a checkout that shows an error loses the sale. Compare the larger Web Hosting plans with Turbo, and read our WordPress and WooCommerce guide before you launch.

A local news portal

Thirty articles a day.

• Bandwidth: 200,000 visitors × 2 pages × 2 MB = 800 GB. With the margin, 1.2 TB.
• Storage: 30 articles × 365 days = 10,950 a year. At 1 MB of images each, that is about 11 GB a year, plus 1 GB of database. Three years comes to 36 GB, or 37 GB with site files. Divided by 0.7, about 53 GB.
• Rush: breaking news brings 5,000 readers in 10 minutes, viewing 2 pages each. 10,000 ÷ 600 = about 17 a second, so 17 at the counter and 17 × 64 MB = about 1.1 GB of memory. If a page cache answers 90% of those requests, only 1.7 a second reach PHP: about 2 at the counter and roughly 128 MB.

Caching does more here than any upgrade. At 1.2 TB a month, check whether a metered allowance covers you at all. Readers abroad travel the international route to a Bangladeshi server, so if you have many, hosting near them or a CDN will serve them better.

Compare your numbers with the current plans

Web Hosting starts from ৳199 a month. Current figures:

These plans do not list an entry-process figure, so if you expect rushes, open a ticket or message us on WhatsApp and ask. Turbo Hosting starts from ৳825 a month, has unmetered bandwidth and lists the limit:

Which hosting plan should I choose?

Size for the next twelve months rather than the next five years. When two plans both cover your bandwidth and storage, let memory and the rush decide between them. For how the three families differ, read shared vs Turbo vs VPS. If you need a virtual server of your own, VPS Hosting starts from ৳950 a month.

Still unsure? Answer a few questions in the plan finder, or send us your three numbers by ticket or WhatsApp and ask.