The Simplest Way To Determine Disk Storage Space for Web Hosting
The quickest and simplest way to determine how much storage space are needed to host your web site is to first determine the number of files and there sizes along with other page elements such as images. Also, it is NOT recommended to select a web hosting plan until the web site is fully designed. Here’s how to determine how much storage space and why not to choose a web hosting plan before the site is fully designed.
The need of knowing the required storage space for hosting is important. If you or your web designer is using any of the popular web site development tools such as MS Frontpage, Adobe Golive, Dreamweaver, etc, check the properties of the site folder for its size in mb. In any of MS Windows OS’s, use Explorer to locate your website folder which holds all your files to be uploaded to the internet. Those files are normally images, videos, mp3, html pages, dynamic scripts etc. Select and right click the mouse button on the site folder. Click on the properties and check to see the folder size in megabyte (mb). Although the site folder will have what we call “overhead built-in”, it will still give you a pretty good indication of the minimum storage space required for hosting your web site. You will be surprised to see how little of a space is required to host your web site. The rule of thumb is to multiply the file size by three to accommodate growth, overhead and bandwidth parameters.
Now that you have an idea of the file size needed, there are a few other things to consider for growth and if your web site becomes popular;
Log files: Are you planning to use log files on your site? If yes! Log file(s) has a tendency to devourer storage space very fast if your website is popular.
E-Mail Accounts: The creation of five or more Web Mail accounts that’s poorly setup with little or no maintenance and collecting a truck load of spam and junk email daily can take a bite into your storage space fast.
Database: Establishing more then one DB file and populating them with customer registration, e-commerce data such as product information or archived material. This type of data can develop into large databases and also can grow very quick if your site is popular.
Bandwidth: This is a form of measurement use to manage resources by web hosting companies. Limits can be set on how much website traffic is available to your web site and the measurements are taken every time someone visits your website. Data has to be transfer by the Internet to and from the web server where your site is hosted and the browser of the person looking at your website files, this can create a lot of traffic. The measurements of how much data transfer took place add up and serve as an indication of how much bandwidth was used within a 30 day period.
The average web site on the Internet does not require the kind of a bandwidth demand requirement or even come close to those high traffic sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Let’s say that your average web page is 25k which includes images, and every day the site has 100 visitors where each visitor views 10 pages. You daily bandwidth usage would be:
25k x 100 visitors x 10 pages each one views = 25mb
In a month you’d use 30 days x 25mb = 750mb.
If your allowance was 1GB / month then you’d be ok, you’re inside that limit.
If you want to reduce your bandwidth, make your pages smaller in size by reducing your page size, or image sizes, or reduce the number of images used, in order to decrease the overall file size. It is recommended that your home page be no more than 40Kb and the other pages in your site be no more than 30Kb.
On the Internet today, there are millions of successful mini to large e-Commerce web sites operating with not much storage space. Many of those sites fall in the range of 10MB to 200 MB. Two years ago you would have paid $35 per Month for 200MB and your site would be “rocking” with lots of storage space. At the time, we operated one of our e-commerce site on 23MB with customer membership, hosting 60 dynamic PHP and static html pages, 3 MySQL DB’s, 2000 JPG and GIF images with an average of 160 visitors per day. The same site today (which I won’t mention the name or URL for privacy) has grown to 78MB which pretty much triple in storage space and the same package plan now costs $47.95 per year.
The Biggest difference today is that drive space are cheaper and web hosting companies are selling you a lot more storage space than you actually need. If a web hosting company doesn’t provide a hosting package to accommodate your requirement, look else where! Don’t get cough up with hosting packages offering 3,000MB or more for hosting a 25MB site. Save your money! You will be paying for more storage space than you will ever use. Here’s a great source http://www.vmawebhost.com which offers small hosting package and lots of good resources.
On the other hand, if you are planning to host several domains with large databases, sub-domains, fortune 500 type e-Commerce, images, videos, gaming or Music sites with a ship load of MP3, then go for it! Here's another top hosting company http://www.hostgator.com that offers large web host plans with lots of features and no contract.
Remember to keep in mind that the smaller the site and its files the faster they load!
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The author of this article has granted permission to those who would like to republish the article. The permission is granted on the term that no part of the article and its contents are modified or change.
Author: Carl Barrett, Systems Engineer – Copyright 2005 by Virtual Media & Associates
