Bandwidth & Storage Predictor for Media & Video
Enter your traffic and your monthly raw media uploads to see the bandwidth and storage your podcast, video, photography, or downloads site actually needs — and whether shared hosting can still handle it.
A typical hosting bandwidth calculator asks about pageviews and stops there — which badly understates the real number for anything media-heavy. A single compressed video watched a few hundred times can consume more bandwidth in a month than ten thousand ordinary blog pageviews combined. This calculator accounts for both: the everyday browsing traffic your pages generate, and the much larger, easy-to-miss load your media library adds every time it’s played or downloaded.
Enter your traffic and media details below. We separate ordinary page bandwidth from media delivery, since they behave very differently.
If you’re writing about media hosting, CDN offload, or bandwidth planning, here’s a ready-to-paste link to this calculator.
How this calculator works
Bandwidth and storage are driven by two almost unrelated things. Storage grows from what you upload, once. Bandwidth grows every single time that upload gets played or downloaded — which for popular media can happen thousands of times over, from a single upload. This calculator keeps the two separate rather than folding them into one vague number, because the fix for a storage problem (more disk space) is completely different from the fix for a bandwidth problem (a CDN or offloaded media hosting).
A raw 4K camera export or an uncompressed WAV recording session can be several times larger — often 5 to well over 10 times — than the compressed version actually delivered to a visitor’s browser. Downloadable files like PDFs or installers are the exception, since they typically aren’t re-compressed for delivery at all. This calculator applies a realistic compression ratio for your media type before estimating delivery bandwidth — using your raw upload size directly would overstate your bandwidth need for audio, video, and photography.
A rarely-viewed archive of high-res photos can have large storage needs but tiny bandwidth. A single video clip that goes viral can have almost no storage footprint but consume more bandwidth in a week than a whole year of ordinary blog traffic. Solving one does not solve the other.
Most “unlimited bandwidth” shared hosting plans have an unwritten soft ceiling — typically somewhere in the low hundreds of gigabytes per month — buried in the fair use section of the terms of service. Cross it consistently and hosts will ask you to upgrade, throttle your site, or in some cases suspend the account, regardless of what the plan name implies.
Reading your results
Your page bandwidth plus your media delivery bandwidth. This is the number to compare against your hosting plan’s bandwidth allowance (or its fair-use ceiling, if it claims to be unlimited).
For most media-focused sites, this number is surprisingly high — often 80% or more. It tells you where any bandwidth problem is actually coming from, and therefore where the fix belongs: offloading media, not upgrading your core web hosting.
Projected over your chosen timeframe, assuming your current upload rate stays roughly constant. If you keep your raw, uncompressed originals as an archive, storage grows considerably faster than if you only keep the compressed, web-delivered copies.
Frequently asked questions
Storage is how much disk space your files occupy at rest, measured once. Bandwidth is how much data moves between your server and visitors over time, and it accumulates every time a file is loaded, played, or downloaded. A single 500MB video file uses 500MB of storage regardless of its popularity, but if 1,000 people watch it in a month, it uses roughly 500GB of bandwidth that same month.
Raw camera footage, RAW photo files, and uncompressed audio recordings are captured at far higher quality than a web browser needs or most connections can stream smoothly. Video encoders, image optimizers, and audio codecs compress that raw file down for actual delivery — often to roughly 8% to 15% of its original size for audio, video, and photography — with a quality loss that’s rarely noticeable at normal viewing or listening conditions. Downloadable files (PDFs, installers, course archives) are the exception: they generally aren’t re-compressed for delivery, so their raw and delivered size are treated as the same.
It depends on the host, but the common outcomes are: your site gets throttled to a crawl, you’re billed overage fees, or you’re asked to upgrade to a higher plan (or your account is suspended in more aggressive cases). None of these are pleasant to discover in the middle of your content actually performing well.
Embedding from YouTube or Vimeo pushes essentially all bandwidth and storage cost onto their infrastructure for free (or for Vimeo’s fee), at the cost of less control over branding, ads, and the viewer experience. Self-hosting or using a dedicated video platform gives you full control but means the bandwidth numbers in this calculator become your direct responsibility — and usually your direct cost.
CDN offloading means storing and serving your media files from a network built specifically for high-volume delivery (Cloudflare R2, AWS S3 + CloudFront, Bunny.net, or similar) instead of your web hosting account. If the calculator above shows media accounting for the large majority of your bandwidth, you likely need it — it’s typically both cheaper per gigabyte and far more resilient to traffic spikes than serving media directly from shared or even VPS hosting.
This varies enormously by audience size and content age, which is why the calculator pre-fills a starting estimate by media type but lets you overwrite it. If you have real analytics — podcast host download stats, video platform view counts, or download logs — use those numbers instead for a far more accurate result. Note this calculator only estimates plays for content uploaded that month; an established back-catalog that still gets regular plays will add to your real bandwidth beyond what’s shown here.
The underlying need is the same — bandwidth for delivery, storage for the library — but audio files are dramatically smaller than video at a comparable duration, so podcasts generally need far less of both. Many podcasters use a dedicated podcast host (which also handles distribution to platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts) rather than serving audio files from their own web hosting at all.
Modern video (H.264/H.265) and audio (AAC/Opus) codecs are specifically designed to remove data a viewer or listener is unlikely to perceive, not just data in general. At sensible settings, the difference is rarely noticeable on typical consumer screens and speakers, while the file size savings are substantial — which is exactly why every major streaming platform compresses aggressively rather than serving raw files.
Media doesn’t just need more storage. It needs a different plan.
A hosting plan sized for pageviews alone will always undersize a media-heavy site, because the numbers that actually matter — plays, downloads, streams — don’t show up in a pageview count at all. Knowing the real bandwidth your content generates is the difference between planning for growth and discovering the limit the hard way, mid-spike.
Size your hosting for what your media actually costs to deliver — not just what it costs to store.