Host bandwidth usage

[AdieB]

This is a difficult question to answer and I am not sure that is even in the correct forum, but it would be great to compare with similar sites. Our site has +-2500 products with images, no PDF documents, 8 email addresses. We upload to 5 datafeeds that upload the data twice weekly at around 8Mb a time.
Our web hosting bandwidth usage is currently aroung 10Gb a month, which has increased quite dramatically over the past 3 months as our site has grown. Does this usage seem high based on similar sites. 10Gb is a large amount of data, our ISP don't give detailed reports.
Any comparisons?

[malbro]

This is a difficult question to answer and I am not sure that is even in the correct forum, but it would be great to compare with similar sites. Our site has +-2500 products with images, no PDF documents, 8 email addresses. We upload to 5 datafeeds that upload the data twice weekly at around 8Mb a time.
Our web hosting bandwidth usage is currently aroung 10Gb a month, which has increased quite dramatically over the past 3 months as our site has grown. Does this usage seem high based on similar sites. 10Gb is a large amount of data, our ISP don't give detailed reports.
Any comparisons?

Bandwidth will depend on a number of factors not all of which you can control, some of the more important are

1/ Number of visitors
2/ Number of pages they view
3/ Size of pages.
4/ Size and frequency of your uploads
5/ Number of downloads of digital products if any.

You can control item 3 and this is probably the main area for you to concentrate on, make sure you keep the page size down as this also affects how search engines rate your site. If you have lots of images try to use compressed jpegs and keep image sizes (height and width) to reasonable values. I try to keep page sizes around 100K/150K or so and trend the average value along with number of visitors, bandwidth, visitors, and sales funnel using AWSTATS.

I look after a customers site with around 400 products, and the bandwidth is usually around 6-8Gb, with an average page size of 125K and around 5 page views per visitor.

[Darren B]

we have a similar amount of products but our visitor numbers are extremely high, we currently run around 50GB per/month it has peaked at over 60gb before now. unique visitors is around 45k

As said its not easy to work out as too many factors influence this but hope this gives you a guide.

[AdieB]

Many thanks for the replies, so based on your inputs, 10Gb does not seem unreasonably high.

[Darren B]

nope but mailbro offers the best advice, so check your page sizes

[malbro]

Many thanks for the replies, so based on your inputs, 10Gb does not seem unreasonably high.

Sounds OK but you really need to get those stats on visitor numbers, page sizes and page views after all if your page size is 1MB then you are getting a factor of 10 less page views than if the page size was 100Mb. It is visitor numbers, and ultimately your conversion rate to customers that really matters, the more you convert the more money to pay for the increased bandwidth.