How to Estimate Traffic and Bandwidth Needs on Shared Hosting and VPS

Choosing between shared hosting and a VPS is much easier when you have a realistic estimate of your traffic and bandwidth needs. Yet in practice, we regularly see two extremes: people who severely overestimate and pay for resources they never use, and people who underestimate and hit limits on their busiest days. The good news is that you don’t need complex tools or guesswork to get this right. With a few simple formulas, some basic analytics, and a realistic safety margin, you can plan hosting that fits your website today and grows with it tomorrow.

In this article, we’ll walk step by step through how to estimate monthly data transfer, required bandwidth (Mbps), and what that means in real life on shared hosting and VPS. We’ll look at typical scenarios (blogs, e‑commerce, SaaS, file downloads), explain how hosting providers actually apply limits, and show you how to monitor real usage over time. Our goal at dchost.com is simple: help you avoid both overpaying for capacity and unpleasant throttling just when your visitors arrive.

Why Traffic and Bandwidth Planning Matters

Before we dive into formulas, it helps to be clear about why this planning matters so much for shared hosting and VPS users.

• Performance: If your bandwidth is too low for your peak traffic, visitors will experience slow page loads, timeouts, or stalled file downloads.
• Stability: On shared hosting, hitting limits can trigger resource throttling, 5xx errors, or temporary suspensions if you consistently exceed fair usage.
• Cost control: Oversizing a VPS “just in case” can double or triple your monthly bill with no real benefit.
• Scalability: When you know your baseline, it’s much easier to plan marketing campaigns, product launches or seasonal peaks in advance.

We’ve already shared a broader capacity planning framework in our detailed guide on how much CPU, RAM and bandwidth a new website needs. Here we’ll zoom in specifically on traffic and bandwidth: how to estimate them, convert between “GB per month” and “Mbps”, and map those numbers to shared hosting versus VPS in a practical way.

Key Concepts: Traffic, Bandwidth, Data Transfer and Concurrency

Hosting terminology can be confusing because several words are used interchangeably. Let’s clarify the terms we’ll use:

Traffic vs. Data Transfer

• Traffic (visits, pageviews): How many users visit your site and how many pages they load. You usually see this in tools like Google Analytics or Matomo as sessions and pageviews.
• Data transfer (GB/month): The total amount of data sent from your server to visitors over a period, usually a month. This is often what hosting plans describe as “monthly traffic” or “bandwidth included”.

Traffic is about how many requests you serve. Data transfer is about how big those responses are in bytes.

Bandwidth (Mbps)

Bandwidth is the maximum rate at which data can be transferred at a given moment, usually measured in megabits per second (Mbps). Think of it as the width of your pipe. Two sites can both use 1 TB per month, but if one gets all its traffic in a few hours each day, it needs more bandwidth than a site where traffic is evenly spread 24/7.

Hosting providers sometimes state bandwidth as:

• Port speed (e.g. 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps on a VPS or dedicated server)
• Soft/“unmetered” limits on shared hosting, often controlled by fair usage and CPU/IO limits rather than a hard Mbps cap

Concurrency (Simultaneous Users)

Concurrency is how many visitors you serve at the same time. It matters because bandwidth is shared between them. If you have 1 Mbps and 10 users downloading 1 MB images simultaneously, each will effectively see only a fraction of that Mbps.

Estimating concurrency precisely can be complex, but for planning purposes you can start with simple assumptions like “peak = 5x average hourly traffic” and refine later.

Step-by-Step Method to Estimate Bandwidth Needs

Let’s build a practical estimation process you can reuse for any project. You’ll only need:

• Your current or expected monthly visitors/pageviews
• Average page size in megabytes (MB)
• A safety margin for growth and peaks

1. Estimate Monthly Visitors and Pageviews

If your site is already live, use analytics:

• Monthly sessions (visits)
• Monthly pageviews

If you’re planning a new site, start with conservative assumptions. For example:

• New blog: 3,000–10,000 pageviews/month in the first few months
• Local business site: 1,000–5,000 pageviews/month
• Growing e‑commerce: 20,000–100,000 pageviews/month depending on marketing

If you expect aggressive marketing or big campaigns, keep that in mind now; we’ll add a safety margin later. For more campaign-oriented planning, you can also refer to our hosting scaling checklist for traffic spikes and big campaigns.

2. Measure Average Page Size

Your average page size is the total size of HTML, CSS, JS, images, fonts, and other assets loaded when a user visits a typical page.

To measure it:

1. Open your site in Chrome or Firefox.
2. Open Developer Tools → Network tab.
3. Load a representative page (home, article, product page).
4. Look at “Transferred” or “Total” size at the bottom.

Do this for 3–5 typical pages and take the average. Rough guidelines:

• Well‑optimized blog page: 0.5–1.5 MB
• Image‑heavy article or portfolio: 2–5 MB
• Unoptimized pages with large images: easily 5–10+ MB

If you’re still in development, you can estimate based on your design and content strategy. Remember that compression (gzip/Brotli), image formats (WebP/AVIF) and a CDN can reduce size significantly. We explain this in depth for image‑heavy sites in our hosting strategy guide for image-heavy websites using WebP/AVIF and CDN.

3. Calculate Monthly Data Transfer

Now we combine pageviews and average page size.

Formula:

Monthly data transfer (MB) = Monthly pageviews × Average page size (MB)

Then convert MB → GB:

GB = MB ÷ 1024 (for planning, dividing by 1,000 is fine for a rough estimate).

Example 1: Small Blog

• Pageviews: 10,000/month
• Average page size: 1.5 MB

Data transfer:

• 10,000 × 1.5 MB = 15,000 MB ≈ 15 GB/month

Example 2: Image-Heavy Portfolio

• Pageviews: 20,000/month
• Average page size: 4 MB

Data transfer:

• 20,000 × 4 MB = 80,000 MB ≈ 80 GB/month

Example 3: Growing E‑Commerce

• Pageviews: 100,000/month
• Average page size: 2.5 MB

Data transfer:

• 100,000 × 2.5 MB = 250,000 MB ≈ 250 GB/month

Most shared hosting plans can comfortably handle tens of GB per month for typical websites, especially when caching and CDNs are used. Higher hundreds of GB or TB‑level usage often point towards a VPS or a specialized setup.

4. Convert Data Transfer to Required Bandwidth (Mbps)

Monthly GB doesn’t tell you how much instantaneous bandwidth you need during peak hours. To estimate bandwidth, we make a simple assumption about peak vs average usage.

First, convert monthly GB to average Mbps:

1. Convert GB/month → MB/month: GB × 1024
2. Convert MB → megabits (Mb): MB × 8
3. Divide by seconds in month (≈ 30 days × 24 × 3600 = 2,592,000 seconds)

Formula:

Average Mbps ≈ (GB × 1024 × 8) ÷ 2,592,000

Example: 250 GB per Month

• GB = 250
• MB = 250 × 1024 = 256,000 MB
• Megabits = 256,000 × 8 = 2,048,000 Mb
• Average Mbps = 2,048,000 ÷ 2,592,000 ≈ 0.79 Mbps

So on average, 250 GB/month is less than 1 Mbps. But traffic is not flat; you’ll have busy hours.

A common, pragmatic rule of thumb:

• Peak traffic ≈ 3–5 × average for many sites.

So if average is ~0.8 Mbps, peak might be 2.4–4 Mbps. A typical shared hosting environment with a well‑optimized site can handle that, but if your peak is driven by heavy file downloads or uncompressed images, you might need more headroom or a VPS.

5. Add Overhead, Safety Margins and Growth

Real traffic is messy. You should always add a buffer.

• Protocol overhead: TCP/IP, TLS, headers, and retries add 10–20% overhead.
• Bot traffic: Crawlers and bots increase requests without obvious benefit.
• Cache misses: The first time a file is served, it costs more bandwidth before caching and browsers kick in.
• Growth: If you’re actively marketing, assume 20–50% growth over the next 6–12 months.

A simple way to account for this:

• Multiply monthly GB estimate by 1.5× (50% overhead + growth buffer).
• Design for peak bandwidth of 5× average (for most small–medium sites).

Revisiting our 250 GB e‑commerce example:

• Adjusted monthly transfer: 250 GB × 1.5 = 375 GB/month
• Average Mbps ≈ (375 × 1024 × 8) ÷ 2,592,000 ≈ 1.18 Mbps
• Peak Mbps (×5): ~6 Mbps

This gives you a more realistic picture to compare against shared hosting fair usage and typical VPS port speeds (e.g. 100 Mbps, 250 Mbps, 1 Gbps).

Shared Hosting vs VPS: How Limits Are Actually Applied

Now that you have numbers, how do they map to real-world hosting plans?

Shared Hosting: The Hidden Limits

On shared hosting, you rarely see a hard Mbps cap. Instead, providers enforce:

• CPU limits (percentage of a shared core you can use)
• Memory (RAM) limits
• Disk IO / IO operations
• Entry processes / concurrent PHP processes

Many shared plans advertise “unmetered” or very high bandwidth, but if your site uses too much CPU or IO, you’ll be throttled before hitting those theoretical GB/month numbers. To understand these limits better, you can read our guide to cPanel resource limits and fixing the ‘Resource Limit Reached’ error.

For most small to medium sites that:

• Serve optimized pages (under 2–3 MB on average)
• Use caching plugins (for WordPress) and basic image optimization
• Stay below ~100–150 GB/month in real traffic

Shared hosting is often perfectly fine. The main danger is heavy dynamic workloads (e.g. badly cached WordPress, high cart activity) rather than raw bandwidth itself.

When a VPS Becomes the Better Fit

A VPS makes sense when one or more of these apply:

• You regularly exceed shared hosting CPU/IO limits even with optimization.
• Your monthly transfer is in the high hundreds of GB or multiple TB.
• You need guaranteed port speed (e.g. 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps) for downloads, APIs or streaming.
• You require custom server software, advanced caching (Redis, Varnish) or database tuning.

At dchost.com, we usually suggest starting with shared hosting for smaller sites and moving to VPS once your performance or flexibility needs outgrow the shared environment. If you plan your capacity properly, this move can be smooth; our article on moving from shared hosting to a VPS with zero downtime outlines that migration step by step.

Special Cases: When Bandwidth Estimates Need Extra Care

So far we’ve focused on “normal” web pages. Some workloads change the picture significantly.

1. File Downloads (PDFs, Installers, Assets)

If you host downloadable files, bandwidth depends on:

• Average file size (e.g. 10 MB PDF, 200 MB installer)
• Number of downloads/month

Formula:

Download data (GB) = (File size in MB × Number of downloads) ÷ 1024

Add this to your pageview‑based estimate. Even “small” downloads add up quickly if they’re popular. For heavy download sites, a VPS with higher port speed or offloading downloads to object storage + CDN is usually best. Our guide on object storage vs block storage vs file storage for web apps and backups is a good next step if you’re considering that approach.

2. Images and Video

Large images and self‑hosted video can dominate your bandwidth usage. To keep costs and performance under control:

• Convert images to modern formats (WebP, AVIF).
• Use responsive images (different sizes for mobile/desktop).
• Offload heavy assets to a CDN.

If you’re new to CDNs, start with our explanation of what a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is and its advantages. If you already use one and worry about costs, our article on controlling CDN bandwidth costs with cache hit ratio and regional pricing goes deeper into strategy.

For video, we almost always recommend a dedicated streaming platform or object storage + CDN instead of serving large MP4 files directly from shared hosting. On a VPS it’s technically possible, but bandwidth and CPU usage can grow very quickly.

3. Dynamic E‑Commerce and SaaS

For e‑commerce and SaaS, CPU and database IO typically become bottlenecks before raw bandwidth. Still, bandwidth matters when:

• Product pages have many large images.
• You serve large JS bundles (dashboards, single‑page apps).
• You run APIs for mobile or partner integrations.

For these cases, combine bandwidth estimation with capacity planning for CPU, RAM and IOPS. Our articles on WooCommerce capacity planning (vCPU, RAM, IOPS) and when WooCommerce really needs separate database and cache servers can help if you’re scaling an online store.

Monitoring Real Usage and Knowing When to Upgrade

Estimates are only the starting point. Once your site runs on shared hosting or a VPS, you should validate and refine those numbers with real metrics.

Where to Check Bandwidth and Traffic

• Control panel stats: cPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk usually show monthly bandwidth and daily breakdowns.
• Web server logs: Access logs can be summed to calculate actual bytes sent (use tools like GoAccess, AWStats, or custom scripts).
• Analytics tools: Google Analytics/Matomo for visits and pageviews; combine with measured page size.
• VPS monitoring: On VPS, tools like vnStat, iftop or full monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana) show real-time bandwidth usage.

If you’re on a VPS and want a structured start, we’ve shared a practical approach in our guide to VPS monitoring and alerts with Prometheus, Grafana and Uptime Kuma.

Signs You’re Hitting Bandwidth or Resource Limits

Watch for:

• Noticeable slowdown during peak hours while off‑peak is fine.
• cPanel “Resource Limit Reached” messages or 508 errors.
• Frequent 5xx errors (500, 502, 503) under load.
• Very high CPU/IO usage in your panel or monitoring tools, even with caching enabled.

If your bandwidth estimate is correct but you still see issues, the bottleneck is probably CPU, RAM, or storage performance rather than network capacity. In that case, optimizing application code, enabling caching (e.g. LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress), or moving to a VPS with NVMe storage can bring much bigger improvements than simply buying more “bandwidth”.

How Often to Revisit Your Estimates

We recommend:

• Every 3–6 months for stable sites.
• After major campaigns (Black Friday, product launches).
• Whenever you change design significantly (new theme, new image strategy, adding video).

Look at trends, not single days. If your 95th percentile or peak bandwidth steadily grows and gets close to what your shared hosting or VPS comfortably handles, it’s time to plan an upgrade before you feel pain.

Practical Bandwidth Planning Scenarios

Let’s bring everything together with concrete examples and what we’d typically recommend at dchost.com.

Scenario 1: New WordPress Blog on Shared Hosting

• Content type: Articles with a few images.
• Expected pageviews: 8,000/month initially.
• Average page size after optimization: 1.2 MB.

Monthly transfer:

• 8,000 × 1.2 MB = 9,600 MB ≈ 9.6 GB
• With 50% margin: ~15 GB/month

Average bandwidth:

• 15 GB → (15 × 1024 × 8) ÷ 2,592,000 ≈ 0.047 Mbps (average)
• Peak @5×: ~0.25 Mbps

This is trivial for any modern shared hosting plan. Here your main concerns are:

• Choosing a reliable provider and region close to your audience.
• Enabling caching and using a good WordPress cache plugin.
• Optimizing images to keep page size small.

Bandwidth is not the limiting factor here; shared hosting is ideal until your traffic grows much higher or your site becomes more complex (e.g. adding WooCommerce).

Scenario 2: Photographer Portfolio with Large Images

• Content type: High-resolution galleries.
• Pageviews: 30,000/month.
• Average page size: 5 MB (multiple large images).

Monthly transfer:

• 30,000 × 5 MB = 150,000 MB ≈ 150 GB
• With 50% margin: ~225 GB/month

Average bandwidth:

• 225 GB → (225 × 1024 × 8) ÷ 2,592,000 ≈ 0.71 Mbps
• Peak @5×: ~3.5 Mbps

This is still manageable on shared hosting if the provider’s fair usage policies are reasonable and you optimize well. However, this kind of site benefits greatly from:

• Using WebP/AVIF and responsive images.
• Serving images via CDN to reduce load on the origin.

If your galleries go viral or you start serving even higher resolutions, a VPS + CDN combination gives you more headroom.

Scenario 3: Growing WooCommerce Store on VPS

• Content type: Product pages, cart, checkout, account pages.
• Pageviews: 200,000/month.
• Average page size: 2.5 MB.

Monthly transfer:

• 200,000 × 2.5 MB = 500,000 MB ≈ 500 GB
• With 50% margin: ~750 GB/month

Average bandwidth:

• 750 GB → (750 × 1024 × 8) ÷ 2,592,000 ≈ 2.37 Mbps
• Peak @5×: ~12 Mbps

At this point, the total monthly transfer and dynamic nature of traffic (cart, checkout) make a VPS very attractive:

• You can tune PHP‑FPM, MySQL/MariaDB and caching specifically for WooCommerce.
• You typically get at least 100 Mbps port speed, so 12 Mbps peak is easy.
• You can add Redis object caching, separate DB, or scaling later as needed.

Here, bandwidth planning is about confirming that your VPS port speed is sufficient for peaks and that you’re not under‑provisioning network resources if you expect traffic to double during campaigns.

Turning Estimates into a Real Hosting Plan

Estimating traffic and bandwidth doesn’t have to be guesswork. Start with your current or expected pageviews, measure (or reasonably estimate) average page size, and turn that into monthly GB and approximate Mbps. Add a healthy safety margin for overhead and growth, then match those numbers to what shared hosting and VPS realistically offer, not just what’s printed on the sales page.

For smaller, mostly static or lightly dynamic sites, well‑optimized shared hosting at dchost.com usually provides more than enough bandwidth and performance, especially when combined with caching and optional CDN. As your site evolves towards heavier e‑commerce, SaaS or media workloads, a VPS gives you dedicated resources, higher port speeds, and the freedom to tune your stack exactly the way you need.

The key is to keep this process iterative: estimate, deploy, monitor, adjust. Revisit your numbers a few times per year and ahead of major campaigns, and you’ll avoid surprises. If you’re unsure where your project sits on the shared hosting vs VPS spectrum, our team at dchost.com can review your analytics and logs with you and suggest a realistic plan and upgrade path based on real data, not guesswork.