A podcaster friend of mine recently became concerned about how much bandwidth she’d need for her podcast. She pays a monthly fee for a hosted solution that has a limit on the monthly bandwidth. If that limit is exceeded she pays extra on top of the monthly fee. This is a common practice and is valid for web sites too not just podcasts. Because of that, she wanted to know…

What is this bandwidth thing, should she ever have to pay that and how do you reduce your bandwidth?

There are several questions there so let’s break things down.

Think of bandwidth as the number of times a file is allowed to be downloaded in a month. Take a look at this scenario.

Your podcast file size = 1MB
Your allowed monthly bandwidth = 100MB

This means you can only download your podcast 100 times during that month.

Realistically, it is more complex because you don’t have only one file you may have 5, 10 or more in a varying number of sizes. Still let’s just attempt to do a little math just for giggles.

Let’s say you have 10 files and the size of them combined is 20MB. Assuming the same bandwidth allowance, that means if all the shows are downloaded equally you can only download them 5 times a month.

Again, in real life things are not always cut and dried like that some shows will be downloaded more often and some less etc but I believe you would already see how bandwidth works.

Knowing this, here’s what you could do.

1. Reduce the file size of each recording
2. Reduce the number of available downloadable files
3. Do not set your player to autoplay

These are all temporary measures because as your traffic grows and more people start downloading, you may eventually hit the ceiling.

So… how much bandwidth will she need?

This is one of those really subjective things as you can tell from the above examples, there are many variables. The file size, the number of times it will be downloaded, how many files you have in your account. The toughest part to determine is how many times your files will be downloaded in a month. You really can’t know that unless you have some history. Even when you have history, every website and podcast owner I know wants to increase their traffic and listener base so and some month will be more, some months will be less.

Will you ever have to pay for bandwidth overages?

For most web sites and podcasts the answer is likely no and it all depends where you host your files.

• If you host your files on your web site, watch out! Because your podcast shares the bandwidth with your web site so you may reach the maximum a lot faster.
• If you host your files on a 3rd party host then there’s a good chance no as well because most services offer really generous bandwidth.
• If you host your files on Amazon S3 – probably never because you are billed on what you use so there is no ‘ceiling’ but you may find yourself with a larger bill. However, considering how low S3’s costs are this could be really minimal.

Should you worry about how much bandwith you should have?

For the average business site probably not. Unless you are expecting thousands upon thousands of people watching a launch video or thousands downloading your podcast every week. This is one of those things that you should only worry about when you come to the bridge. And if you do – that’s a good problem to have. It means you have a really popular podcast or web site and if you are monetizing your efforts properly, costs shouldn’t be a problem. And this means you shouldn’t even need to think about how much bandwidth is right for you.

Photo by ansik