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Know How Much Hosting Space and Bandwidth You Need Many web hosts try to sell you a large amount of web hosting space that then costs you a lot each month. However, you may not need this much space. Have you ever calculated just how much disc space (MB) your web site uses? Do you really need an expensive hosting solution for your web site? For my first web site, I purchased 20mb of disc space and wondered if this would be enough as I added pages to it. Well, recently I checked the size of this site which had grown to over 20 pages. To my surprise the size was only 3,269KB. This means it only uses a little over 3Mb of disk space. Most of my friends' sites also only use 2-3Mb. Therefore it is not necessary to purchase a large amount of space for a small site (if 20 pages = 3Mb, then 20Mb = 140 pages approx). Are you paying TOO much for the actual space you need? How Do You Calculate the File Size of Your Web Site? 1. First you need to understand how file size is measured. The smallest unit on a computer is a bit. One bit is one electronic on or off pulse. 8 bits strung together make one byte. One byte of information can put a letter, such as “B” on your screen. If you put 1024 bytes together and then you have one unit of information called a kilobyte. Put 1024 kilobytes together and you have a megabyte. (Most floppy disks hold around 1.4 megabytes of information). Most of your graphics and web pages are measured in bytes or kilobytes. 2. To determine your total site file size, right click on the root folder where your web site is housed – this will not only give you the total site size but also how many files and folders are contained in your site. 3. If you use an editor, such as FrontPage, go to the reports view, click on the site summary and you will get a reading of the total site file size. In Dreamweaver, just use the method in No 2. Prepare to Expand Your Hosting Plan You may want to add pages, graphics, features eg scripts, databases etc., to your site in the future. Begin with a small hosting plan at first (even 5mb is enough to start out with), and then expand it as you add new features. Check with your web host, if you can easily upgrade your hosting plan as you grow your site. You don’t want to go through the hassle of changing hosts every few months. Once you have determined your total site file size, check what hosting plan
you have purchased and how much disc space has been allocated for your site. If
you are only using 3mb of disc space but are paying for 100mb, then you may want
to switch hosting plans and save yourself a ton of money each year.
Let’s discuss each of these topics in more depth. What is “bandwidth usage?” The larger the file, the higher the bandwidth usage when it is downloaded.
The more traffic to your site, the more bandwidth you will use. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The “data transfer rate” is the speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and Mbps, respectively. Bits and Bytes How Much Bandwidth Do I Need? To determine how much bandwidth you need, estimate the file size of each web page, and then multiply it by the number of pages on your web site. Multiply this figure by the number of the number of page views you expect per month from your site. For example, if your web page consists of two 15Kb images and 3Kb of html, you would have 33Kb of data for that page. Now multiply this by the number of page views you expect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). This would mean 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per month for that page. Now recalculate this number for each page, and you’ll know approximately how
much bandwidth your entire site requires. The easy way is to reduce the size of the files on your site, particularly images and other graphics. For example, you have a large image (i.e. 200KB) on your web page that is downloaded by each visitor every time the page is requested. If you reduce this image to 20KB or remove it altogether, it will dramatically cut your bandwidth usage. It will also speed up your site’s performance. Web Sites that have MP3s to download, movies, music playing in the background and large images, will obviously have a higher bandwidth. Large web sites or sites that expect a lot of traffic will also use a lot. If your site has mainly HTML pages and small images, your bandwidth will not be that high. Bandwidth Tools Monitoring bandwidth Web Page Checker Tuning up your Web Site Bandwidth Tips If you make changes to your site by adding more files and/or web pages, recalculate your web site file size. Estimate how many visitors will be accessing your web pages over the next few months. Recalculate the bandwidth usage for your site. You may need more web space and bandwidth for your site to function effectively. Check with your web hosting company to upgrade your hosting plan. Conclusion Now you can avoid the shock of exceeding your monthly bandwidth usage and paying higher hosting fees. You are now ready to receive more traffic to your site and therefore make more sales. Copyright 2002 Herman Drost Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of
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