How much web hosting space and bandwidth do you really need for your website?
One of our commitments to our customers is that we will never force our products/service on you just for the sake of selling these. We try our best to match your requirement with the products and services we offer and fit the one that best fits your needs. We have been selling our hosting services both in the local market and in the international market for the last 2 years and we have been slowly building a set of loyal customers for these services. One of the frequent questions that we have had to answer was "How much web space and bandwidth do you really need for a website". This is a tough question to answer without really knowing what you are going to put up on the site and how many are going to visit it. In any case here are the general tips and guidelines that we offer our customers.
These days very few people go along with the traditional pure HTML sites. Most get their sites set up using one of the popular content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress etc. We normally recommend Wordpress for beginners and Drupal for advanced users. A typical installation would take between 5-15MB of space depending on the modules that you set up. Adding pages to these CMSs would probably only increase the size by maybe 20kB per additional page. By this rate you could host a thousand pages in 20MB of space. How much more space would you need would depend on a few of things - mainly images, audio and video files. Another factor which people fail to consider is the space requirements for mail accounts.
Space required for hosting images
For one it would depend on the number of images that you are going to store on the site. People sometimes enquire about the possibility of posting high resolution photos on their websites. Any resolution above 1024x768 would practically not make any difference to the end user who is going to view it over a typical internet connection on a typical monitor. So storing higher resolution photos are only going to be an unnecessary expense that you will have to bear. An average 1024x768 image (jpeg format is ideal and around 85% quality is optimal) would be around 100kB-150kB. So for every 6-7 pictures that you want to post you will need 1MB of hosting space. An alternative to this would be to use your hosting space to host your CMS and then host your images on public hosting services offered by sites like flickr or picasa
Space required for hosting audio and video
Small and medium websites also cannot really afford to host massive content like video and audio on their sites directly. Instead they can utilize the free media hosting websites like Youtube or Blip.tv. Even if these sites are able to squeeze these media files into the hosting spaces the massive bandwidth requirement that is going to come from users viewing these media files are normally beyond the range of common hosting packages. Most of the Free Software CMSes support some kind of plugin that will allow you to access these media files from other sites and show them directly on your website without them having to visit these external sites. The only downside would be that the viewers will normally be offered an option to visit the hosting sites by these plugins. We normally recommend small and medium website owners to go for one of these options when they have to host media content.
Using GMail as your Mail Server and saving on hosting space
Google had started offering custom domain name support for gmail quite a while back. This allows Small and Medium website users to directly opt for using Google as their mail server and save on their hosting bills. This option offers the possibility of using the safe and secure mail service offered by Google and at the same time retain your identity by using your own domain names. If you need to configure your domain to use Google Mail Server do get in touch with us and we will be able to help you with this.
Hosting Account Monthly Bandwidth Limit
More important than the hosting account size requirements are the bandwidth requirements for your site. But calculating this is pretty straightforward. Typical web pages generated using such CMS frameworks have sizes around 100-150kB each. So if you are expecting 10000 page views every month or around 300 pageviews every day you will need around 2GB of monthly bandwidth. Now if you are using external services for hosting your media content then you don't have to worry about the bandwidth usage for such content.
Buying our services
You can take a look at the current hosting plans offered by Zyxware and decide for yourself the plan that you would need based on the above recommendations. Once you pick your plan make a payment as per payment options provided and send us a mail at hosting [at] zyxware.com and we will set up your hosting for you.
