Estimating Your Web Hosting Requirements
When you are ready to host your website for the first time, there are too many questions in your mind such as – which host and why? You do some research on internet and learn the terms such as disc space, bandwidth, speed, shared hosting and so on, but you feel lost since you are not sure about your hosting requirements. An introduction to same basic concepts will help you proceed in right direction.
Disc Space – First you need to see the size of your website and how much space you need on the server. It varies from 50 MB to more than 1000MB. Disc size depends on the design and purpose of site. A simple static site with a few text based pages and some images will have less size as compared to a flash based interactive site.
Bandwidth – It is the amount of data you expect to be transferred over the site in one month. It includes all files that you or users upload or download from site. Bandwidth depends on certain factors such as number of pages in site that need user interaction, number of users you expect to interact, and the file size, and so on.
Features and Design of Site – Another important aspect is the design and features of your website. If your size has lots of graphics or flash animations, it must be a heavy site. Further, if you have a shopping cart, or a video media player, you need a hosting service that supports all these features.
You should weight down all criteria carefully and make an estimate of your hosting requirements.
