Bandwidth & Storage Predictor for Media & Video
Work out the monthly bandwidth and storage your podcast, video, photography or downloads site really needs, from episode length and bitrate, plays per item and your back-catalog, and see what it would cost to offload the media.
Most bandwidth calculators multiply pageviews by page size and stop there. For a media site that badly understates the real number: one 10-minute 1080p video watched in full 300 times moves about 176 GB, more than 60,000 pageviews of a typical 2.6 MB page. This calculator works out the size of each episode, video or file from its length and bitrate, counts plays of new and older content, and projects how bandwidth and storage grow as your library does. Every assumption is shown in the results and listed with its source further down the page.
Defaults are example starting points. Replace them with your own numbers from your analytics, podcast host or server logs for the best result.
Writing about podcast hosting, video hosting, CDNs or bandwidth planning? Copy a link, or embed the working calculator on your own page. Every result also has its own shareable link.
PaidHosting.com. (2026). Bandwidth & Storage Predictor for Media & Video. Retrieved from https://www.paidhosting.com/bandwidth-storage-predictor/
How this calculator works
Bandwidth and storage are driven by two different things. Storage grows with what you publish, once. Bandwidth grows every time something is played or downloaded, which for popular media can be thousands of times per file. The calculator keeps the two separate, because the fix for a storage problem (more disk space) is different from the fix for a bandwidth problem (a CDN or offloaded media).
All figures use decimal units (1 GB = 1,000 MB), the same way hosts and CDNs bill. Each month the new items join the library, so later months include their ongoing plays. The video “share watched” only applies to video; podcast episodes and files are counted as full downloads.
Episode and video sizes come from length × bitrate, using Apple’s published podcast and HLS streaming recommendations, so you can check every number yourself. If you know your actual file sizes, use the photography or downloads setting and enter them directly.
Older episodes, videos and files keep getting played. The calculator includes them and adds each month’s new uploads to the library, so you see how bandwidth grows over one, two or three years, not just this month.
Plans sold with “unlimited” bandwidth are still covered by the host’s acceptable use or fair use policy. Read it before you rely on shared hosting to deliver a large media library.
Typical scenarios
Worked examples using the same formulas as the calculator (12-month storage, 2.6 MB pages). Plays per item are illustrative, not industry averages. Click any row to load it into the calculator and change the numbers.
| Scenario | Bandwidth / month | From media | Storage after 1 yr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly podcast 45-min episodes at 128 kbps; 4 new episodes × 1,000 downloads, 100 back-catalog episodes × 50 downloads; 10,000 pageviews | 415 GB | 94% | 6.39 GB | Open in calculator |
| Video creator (self-hosted) 10-min 1080p videos, 60% watched on average; 4 new × 500 views, 50 older videos × 50 views; 20,000 pageviews; all streaming renditions stored | 1.63 TB | 97% | 188 GB | Open in calculator |
| Photographer portfolio 1 MB web photos; 200 new × 80 views, 2,000 existing × 5 views; 15,000 pageviews | 65 GB | 40% | 4.4 GB | Open in calculator |
| Online course downloads 200 MB course files; 2 new × 60 downloads, 20 existing × 30 downloads; 5,000 pageviews | 157 GB | 92% | 8.8 GB | Open in calculator |
Reading your results
Page bandwidth plus media delivery. Compare it with your hosting plan’s bandwidth allowance and acceptable use policy. The second figure shows where you’ll be once your library has grown, if you keep publishing at the same rate.
For most media sites this is very high. It tells you where any bandwidth problem comes from, and so where the fix belongs: offloading media, not upgrading your core web hosting.
Your published media library at the end of the projection, plus any originals you keep and a backup copy if you ticked it. Website files and databases are not included; for most sites they are small next to media.
A rough monthly bill for storing and serving the media on Cloudflare R2 or Bunny, using their list prices. Use it to compare against the cost of a bigger hosting plan.
Sources and assumptions
- Page size: HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025, Page Weight (July 2025 crawl): median home page 2.86 MB on desktop, 2.56 MB on mobile.
- Podcast bitrates: Apple, Apple Podcasts audio requirements: MP3 at 96–128 kbps for mono or 128–256 kbps for stereo.
- Video bitrates and renditions: Apple, HLS Authoring Specification for Apple Devices: H.264 ladder from 145 kbps (234p) to 7,800 kbps (1080p); HEVC ladder up to 16,800 kbps (4K). Rendition factor = sum of the ladder up to the chosen rung ÷ that rung (540p 2.17, 720p 2.63, 1080p 3.29, 4K 3.34).
- Cloudflare R2: R2 pricing: $0.015 per GB-month of storage, 10 GB-month free, no egress charge; operations are billed separately ($4.50 per million Class A, $0.36 per million Class B, with a free allowance).
- Bunny: Bunny CDN pricing and Bunny Storage pricing: CDN Standard $0.01/GB in Europe and North America (up to $0.06/GB in other regions); Storage $0.01/GB per month for one region; $1 monthly minimum.
- Our assumptions: default plays per item, the 100 GB and 500 GB thresholds, and the example scenarios are PaidHosting.com’s own illustrative numbers, not industry data. Prices checked October 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Storage is how much disk space your files take up, measured once. Bandwidth (data transfer) is how much data moves from your server to visitors, and it adds up every time a file is loaded, played or downloaded. A 500 MB video uses 500 MB of storage no matter how popular it is, but if 1,000 people watch all of it in a month, it uses about 500 GB of bandwidth that month.
From its length and bitrate: size in MB = minutes × 60 × kbps ÷ 8 ÷ 1,000. A 45-minute episode at 128 kbps is 43.2 MB. A 10-minute 1080p video at 7,800 kbps (the top 1080p rung in Apple’s HLS Authoring Specification) is 585 MB. If you know your real file sizes, use those.
Because older content keeps getting played. A podcast back-catalog or a library of tutorials can use more bandwidth each month than the new uploads do. Enter how many items you already have and roughly how many plays or downloads each one gets per month.
Adaptive streaming (HLS or DASH) stores each video several times at different qualities, so the player can switch to match the viewer’s connection. Using Apple’s recommended ladder, keeping every rendition up to 1080p takes about 3.3 times the storage of the 1080p file alone. Visitors only download one rendition at a time, so this adds storage, not bandwidth.
It depends on the host and plan. Read your plan’s bandwidth allowance and its acceptable use policy, which applies even to plans sold as “unlimited”. Common outcomes include being asked to upgrade, overage charges, or limits placed on the account.
Embedding from YouTube or Vimeo moves the bandwidth and storage onto their platform, at the cost of less control over branding, ads and the viewer experience. Self-hosting gives you full control, but the bandwidth in this calculator becomes your cost.
It means storing and serving your media files from a service built for high-volume delivery, such as Cloudflare R2 or Bunny Storage with the Bunny CDN, instead of from your web hosting account. If media is most of your bandwidth, offloading it is usually cheaper per GB and handles traffic spikes better. Your website itself can stay on ordinary hosting.
The maths is exact; the result is only as good as your inputs. The biggest unknown is plays or downloads per item, so use real numbers from your podcast host, video stats or server logs when you have them. Video bandwidth assumes viewers stream at the quality you pick, so treat it as an upper estimate if many people watch at lower quality.
Media doesn’t just need more storage.
It needs a different plan.
A hosting plan sized for pageviews alone will undersize a media site, because the numbers that matter most (plays, downloads and streams) don’t show up in a pageview count. Knowing the bandwidth your content really generates lets you plan for growth instead of finding the limit mid-spike.
Size your hosting for what your media costs to deliver,
not just what it costs to store.