How to estimate your web hosting needs?
The most basic needs for having a web site on the Internet are disk space and bandwidth.
Estimate your web hosting needs. Disk space refers to the amount of data you can store on the web server. Obviously, the amount of space needed depends on the size of your website. Most websites consist of HTML (text), images, Flash or a combination of all of them.
Text is very inexpensive, taking up very little space. On the other hand, images and flash are more expensive, as they require more disk space.
Ideally, your web page should stay under 50-60KB, including images and flash. The reason is that some people use slow dial-up connections of less than 56Kbps. A 60KB page will take more than 8 seconds to load. It seems like 8 seconds is short, but imagine having to sit and look at a blank page for 8 seconds. That’s a long time. Use the slow dial-up connection as a reference. If your web page loads fast on a slow dial-up connection, it will load even faster on a broadband or high-speed connection.
If your page has an average size of 50KB, you can put about 20 pages in 1Mb of space. If you have 100MB of disk space, you can host 200 pages.
Bandwidth is the amount of data you can transfer to and from your web server per month. It includes all uploads and downloads, both HTTP and FTP. It depends on the size of the website, the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit.
For an average page size of 50 KB, 20,000 visitors per month and 5 pages per visitor, estimate your web hosting needs for your website will need about 5,000 MB, or 5 GB, of bandwidth per month. Remember that 20,000 visitors per month equals approximately 667 visitors per day. Estimate your web hosting needs that’s a figure that even the largest web sites can’t reach.
estimate your web hosting needs
If you are just launching your web site, chances are you don't need a large amount of space, nor a large amount of bandwidth.
Unless you have reason to believe that your website will have a lot of visitors or that you offer movie or music downloads, there is no reason to worry about estimate your web hosting needs, space and bandwidth. However, when choosing a web hosting provider, choose one that will allow you to upgrade disk space and bandwidth if you need it later.
