Knowing About Web Hosting Capabilities
It is ultimately important to get the disk space and traffic volume you need for your website. Your web host is supposed to offer you more disk space, as you need it. Disk space cost has gone down. There is a relationship between disk space and bandwidth. Watch for host providers touting more disk space without additional bandwidth. Sometimes this is why it is cheaper disk space. Higher disk space normally requires extra bandwidth, unless you only use the extra space for storing and backing up files, more disk space usage causes a need for more bandwidth consumption.
Disk space needs are dependent upon file sizes. The number of visitors and their activity determine the bandwidth needs. Text files use a small amount of disk space, whereas, animations, images, videos, and flash movies need extra disk space. If you compress your images before uploading them to your site it lessens space usage and makes them load quicker for visitors. Faster loading on your site’s end especially helps visitors with slow dialup connections to the web.
If you allow uploading of images or video files your disk space usage can go up before you realize it, but your web hosting provider should contact you about that with an e-mail if you consumption soars drastically. It should be easy for you to upgrade.
The size of your html pages will be small, maybe not even 1 KB. But buttons, jpegs, banners, etcetera can easily be a lot larger in KB than the page it is own. Every html page can be expected to use around 5 to 50KB of space on your server. This is because videos, images, flash movies, and animations use more disk space. This is assuming that you have more to your web pages than text. The more graphic elements, sound files etcetera that are used on your web pages the more disk space your web pages consume.
How much data transfer or bandwidth will your website need? Basically, a small to medium website will use around 1GB to 5GB of disk space each month. This can be figured out by calculating the average page size times the typical page views every month. If you have a huge commercial website it will use over 100GB every month.
Don’t sign a contract with a web hosting provider until you know the monthly transfer/bandwidth restrictions, do they close sites that go over the minimum/volume, do they charge a fee for going over the volume, can your needs going forward be taken care of, and will upgrading be easy?
When people visit your site they will connect to it using a modem. But you will use a quicker technology like digital or optical connection. Digitals connections are ISDN, T1 and T2 connections. There are five kinds of optical carriers and they each go a little faster than the other. They are all faster than digital carriers. T1 is now considered a slower method of connection to the web.
Tristan Andrews is a freelance author who writes articles about Web Hosting and Web Host Resources.