How to Estimate Your Web Hosting Needs
This article is aimed specifically for individuals who are new to looking for web hosting. For this reason, I will being discussing basic needs such as shared hosting, bandwidth and space. A majority of people looking for more advanced features such as databases and scripting know already what they need and want.
Web space or disk space refers to the amount of data that you will be able to store on your web server’s hard disk. Every web hosting account will come with a specific amount of space. It is usually more than 5 MB. Recently space of over 1000 MB has become common.
The amount of space that is needed will depend on the website’s size. Most websites contain html (or text) pages along with some images (jpegs or gifs) and perhaps some Flash animation. When it comes to text it is quite economical and takes up very little space. Flash and images require a lot more space and are therefore more “expensive.”
You might think you need lots of color images in order for your website to be very beautiful, but you don’t want to make this mistake. Your main goal should be to try to say all you want to say on your web pages while still keeping the size under 50-60 KB which includes all of your images. The reason for this is that many people still use dial-up connections that have slow speeds of 56 kbps. It will take over 21 seconds for a 150 KB page to load, and that’s under ideal conditions that never happen in real life. If the page is 60 KB it will take 8 seconds or so to load. Even that is a long time. Under 30 KB is a good page size.
If the average size of a page is 30 KB, you would be able to put 33 pages approximately onto 1 MB worth of space. With 10 MB you would be able to host about 330 pages.
Unless you are running a very busy forum or another kind of site where there are multiple people adding content to the site, or you have a download site for downloading software or images, then your space needs will probably be quite modest. Just try to keep your pages to an average of 30 KB and you will have more than enough room with even 1 MB worth of web space.
Emails that you receive take up space as well and will count toward your quota. For each of your email addresses that you have set up on your hosting account, you will need to set up space allowances. Fortunately these days most hosting accounts come with plenty of space.
Bandwidth refers to how much data you can transfer each month. This includes all of your uploads as well as downloads regardless of what type of protocol is used (POP, FTP, HTTP, etc). Bandwidth does depend a lot on the average size of your pages but also depends on how many visitors your website gets and how many pages they view. With average page sizes of 3 KB and 20,000 monthly visitors viewing an average of 3 pages will require approximately 1800 MB or 1.8 GM worth of bandwidth every month. A majority of hosting accounts provide bandwidth a lot higher than that, and receiving 20,000 visitors a month is something most website owners can only dream of. Most websites don’t even get 1,000 visitors a month.
These numbers were provided just to help you estimate what your needs might be. If you are just starting a website, there’s a good chance you won’t need huge amounts of bandwidth or space. For most websites, 1 GB of bandwidth and 10 MB space are plenty.
Unless you think your website is going to have lots of visitors or use up lots of resources, there probably isn’t really any need to worry over bandwidth and space yet. All you really need to do is make your best estimate and be sure that your hosting service allows you to upgrade your account. This will ensure that if you need more bandwidth or space later on, that you won’t have to change hosts.
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