Make
sure you get the disk space and the traffic
volume you need.
How Much Disk Space?
A small or medium
web site will need between 10 and 100MB of disk
space.
If you look at the
size of HTML pages, you will see that the
average size is very small. Maybe even smaller
than 1KB. But if you look at the size of the
images (button, gif, banner, jpg) used inside
the pages, you will often find images many times
larger than the page itself.
Expect each HTML
page to take up between 5 and 50KB of disk space
on your web server, depending on the use of
images or other space consuming elements.
If you plan to use
lots of images or graphic elements (not to
mention sound files or movies), you might be
needing much more disk space.
Make sure that you
know your needs before you start looking for
your web host.
Monthly Traffic
A small or medium
web site will consume between 1GB and 5GB of
data transfer per month.
You can calculate
this by multiplying your average page size with
the number of expected page views per month. If
your average page size is 30KB and you expect
50,000 page views per month, you will need
0.03MB x 50,000 = 1.5GB.
Larger, commercial
sites often consume more than 100GB of monthly
traffic.
Before you sign a
contract with a host provider, make sure to
check this:
-
What are the
restrictions on monthly transfer
-
Will your site
be closed if you exceed the volume
-
Will you be
billed a fortune if you exceed the volume
-
Will my future
need be covered
-
Is upgrading a
simple task
Connection Speed
Visitors to your web
site will often connect via a modem, but your
host provider should have a much faster
connection.
In the early days of
the Internet a T1 connection was considered a
fast connection. Today connection speeds are
much faster.
1 byte equals to 8
bits (and that's the number of bits used to
transport one character). Low speed
communication modems can transport from about 14
000 to 56 000 bits per second (14 to 56 kilobits
per second). That is somewhere between 2000 and
7000 characters per second, or about 1 to 5
pages of written text.
One kilobit (Kb) is
1024 bits. One megabit (Mb) is 1024 kilobits.
One gigabit (Gb) is 1024 megabits.
These are connection
speeds used on the Internet today:
| Name |
Connection |
Speed per second |
| Modem |
Analog |
14.4-56Kb |
| D0 |
Digital (ISDN) |
64Kb |
| T1 |
Digital |
1.55Mb |
| T3 |
Digital |
43Mb |
| OC-1 |
Optical Carrier |
52Mb |
| OC-3 |
Optical Carrier |
156Mb |
| OC-12 |
Optical Carrier |
622Mb |
| OC-24 |
Optical Carrier |
1.244Gb |
| OC-48 |
Optical Carrier |
2.488Gb |
Before you sign up a contract with any hosting
provider, surf some other web sites on their
servers, and try to get a good feeling about
their network speed. Also compare the other
sites against yours, to see if it looks like you
have the same needs. Contacting some of the
other customers is also a valuable option.
.:: advertisement
::.
 |
