Four tools for data and bandwidth: a data unit converter, a download time calculator, a website bandwidth estimator and a hosting usage converter.
Convert between bits and bytes and their decimal multiples. A kilobyte here is 1,000 bytes.
How long a file takes to transfer at a given speed, in the best case.
Estimate the bandwidth and monthly data your website uses from its traffic and page size.
Convert a monthly data allowance into a bandwidth, or the other way around. Fill in one box and leave the other blank.
A bit is the smallest unit of information, either 0 or 1. A byte is 8 bits. Data sizes of files are usually given in bytes, while network speeds are given in bits per second, which is why a 100 Mbit/s connection moves at most 12.5 megabytes each second. In this calculator kilo, mega, giga and tera follow the decimal system, so a kilobit is 1,000 bits and a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes.
The time is the size of the file in bits divided by the speed in bits per second. A 500 MB file is 4,000 megabits, and at 5 Mbit/s that takes 800 seconds, which is 13 minutes and 20 seconds. This is the best case. Real transfers are slower because of protocol overhead such as TCP and encryption, shared connections, and limits at the server end, so a stated bandwidth is not the rate you will always see.
Multiply the page views in a period by the average page size to find the data sent in that period, then spread it over the seconds in the period. The month used here is one twelfth of a 365.25 day year, which is 30.4375 days. The redundancy factor adds headroom for traffic spikes, since a link sized for the average would be overwhelmed at peak. Include the traffic from search engine bots, which can be higher than the traffic from real visitors.
Hosts often sell a monthly data allowance, while network gear is rated in Mbit/s. The hosting converter changes one into the other by treating the allowance as spread evenly over the month. A 1,000 GB allowance, for example, is about 3.04 Mbit/s sustained. Real traffic comes in bursts, so the peak speed you need is higher than this average.
Divide by 8. A speed of 100 megabits per second moves at most 12.5 megabytes per second.
At 100 Mbit/s it takes 80 seconds, which is 1 minute and 20 seconds, in the best case. At 10 Mbit/s it takes 800 seconds.
A megabyte is 8 megabits. Lowercase b is used for bits and uppercase B for bytes.
Multiply the page views by the page size to find the data per period, then convert to Mbit/s and add a redundancy factor, such as 2, for peaks.
This calculator uses 1,000, the decimal standard used for network speeds and many storage devices. Operating systems sometimes use 1,024 and call them kibibytes or just kilobytes.
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