How to Estimate your Website Hosting Needs

Web space (disk space) is the amount of data you can store on the hard disk of the web server. Web hosting accounts come with a certain amount of space, usually over 50 MB and less than 1000 MB.

The amount of space needed depends on the size of the website. Most websites are composed of html (text) pages with a few images (gifs or jpegs) or even a little bit of flash animation. Text occupies very little space, thus making it very economical. Images and flash are much more expensive, since they require a lot of space. People who are new to the web might think that it would be great to have a lot of colorful images to make the website really beautiful. This is a common mistake that is usually made.

Your aim should be to say as much as you can on a page while maintaining its size under 50-60 KB, including images. The reason for this is that there are lots of people using slow dial-up connections of under 56 Kbps. For them a 150 KB will take more than 21 seconds to load. A 60KB page will take more than 8 seconds to load. That’s a lot of time. A good page is under 30 KB. A maximum page is 50-60 KB.

Considering an average page size of 30 KB, you can put approximately 33 pages on 1MB of space. If you have 10MB of space available, you could then host 330 pages. You should be more than fine even with 10 MB of web space.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that you are allowed to transfer per month. This would include all uploads and downloads regardless of the protocol used (HTTP, FTP, POP etc.) The average page size is what will determine the bandwidth. The bandwidth also depends on the number of visitors your website will have and the average number of pages they visit. All this will help you to estimate your needs.

If you are just launching your website, you will not need a huge amount of space, neither a huge amount of bandwidth. For 99% of people, a hosting account with 10MB of space and 1 GB bandwidth is more than enough.

Unless you have reasons to believe that your website will have lots of visitors, there will be little reason for you to worry about space and bandwidth.

You just need to make your own calculations and also try to make sure that the host you choose allows account upgrades. This is to make sure that you will be able to get more space and/or bandwidth if/when you need it without going through all the trouble of changing hosts.