Don’t worry I am not going to offer you anything here 
I just couldn’t come up with a better heading. In the previous two articles I did not talk about anything specific. I just tried to make sure you are prepared to think! I tried to show you that not the greatest “advertising campaign” should make you go with this or some other host. It should be your decision after you evaluate all the options.
In the next couple of articles I will discuss more specific things and problems concerning web hosting and the things that you need to do before you can really make your site up and running.
But first things first. You need to have plan. You have an idea. Maybe your boss or wife told you they want a website on the internet. Maybe you have a great funny looking pet at home and want to show it to the world. So what you need to do? You need to buy a package from the biggest company on the hosting market, right? NO! You need to think!
First of all you need to understand what you really need. It’s because what’s good for Twitter, the New York Times or some other company [generating thousands of clicks per hour] does not mean it will be good for you, too! You need to understand your needs. And here’s where the less interesting part of this article starts. We are going back to school to do some math [ok, not right now, but in a few minutes]. We need to make sure what we will need for our new web page.
The calculations!
Every hosting package you will ever use will say how much data you can store on your web server, how much bandwidth are you allowed to consume during a month, how much data you can upload at once trough FTP/SFTP/etc. to your server and so on.
So you see it’s very important to make sure you really know how much of these you need beforehand. It’ the most stupid idea to buy a package that does not suit your needs and pay more money then you need. Paying for the bandwidth you don’t use, space you don’t use etc. Always make sure you make at least some basic calculations before you start to look for a certain service.
How do I find out how much space will I need?
In this section I would like to show you how to calculate how much web space your web site will need. It’s the amount of data you will be able to store on your server.
Well, every web site consumes other volumes of space and bandwidth. If you have a forum with many subscribers you will need more server space then a personal html web page or a basic WordPress blog.
You can find out how much space you really need by looking at your let’s say index folder [for html web pages only!] at looking how big it is. This will tell you how much space will your html web page use on the server. Of course make sure you order a little more space if you think you will upload there things later.
Example: Let’s say you intend to upload 200 photos to some sort of personal site and each is 200kB.
200photos x 200kB = 40 000kB that’s some 40MB! [divide it be 1000 although 1MB is 1024kB, but it's easier to make it 1000]
So you need 40+MB for your web site!
And what about the bandwidth thing?
Bandwidth is the amount of data, that your website uses. But it does differ from the amount of space you need on a server – in a big way! Bandwidth is the data your visitors use! Every visitor who lands on your website consumes a fraction of your bandwidth – that’s not bad, it’s great of course, because visitors are those people you want to have on your website! They can generate revenue trough ad clicks, they can be friends who just want to say “hello” etc. .
Well, how do we calculate bandwidth? This is a little bit trickier than server space. But here is how it goes [in simple words]:
size of the site x how many times your website is watched*
*This means how many pages on your site are visited in one month, how many times all visitors go to any part of your website
Example: You have a website that consume 300kB of bandwidth every time a visitor visits any of it’s part. Daily you have 7 visitors who click on 3 different pages on your website and the month has 30 days.
300kB x 7 x 3 x 30 = 189 000kB = 189MB [divided by 1000 although 1MB=1024kB]
So you need a service that offers at least 189MB of bandwidth/traffic per month. That’s not a lot, but many times you will not need much more for a basic html web page with not so many visitors.
The numbers differ depending on the technology used [java/php/blog/forum/etc], visitors that visit your site and what kind of files you have on your website [photos in high resolution/music,video/etc.].
I am happy we have gone trough this not so interesting part of evaluation. The math is behind us and now we can start looking forward to the more interesting things and topics!
Don’t worry to leave a comment if you are unsure about how much space/bandwidth you will need or to ask any other question!
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