Web Hosting Review Guide (continued)

Web Hosting Disk Space and Bandwidth

Having discussed the importance of web hosting support with your web host, we are now going to investigate the physical requirements that your web hosting will need. The primary elements that we need to look at are the disk space requirements and the bandwidth usage.

Web hosts vary in what they offer in terms of disk space and bandwidth allowance. Your starting point should be to understand what the requirements are likely to be for the type of website that you are building. For example:-

• Simple text pages will require low hard disk pace
• Storing images such as photographs will require a lot of disk space
• Storing music or movies will require humongous amounts of disk space

As far as bandwidth is concerned, we are really talking about use age of your site, rather than storage capacity. S simple web page will download to a users browser quickly, and the 'transaction' will be over very quickly, which will use minimal bandwidth.

However, a music download, or a video server would be online continuously for quite a time. This will use up considerable more bandwidth. Using your site to send and receive email, especially if there is a lot could cause you bandwidth problems over time.

A good professional web host will allow you plenty of resources, irrespective of your requirements, unless they are truly extraordinary.

For most normal use, around 100Mb of disk space should be adequate. If you intend on storing resource hungry files such as photos, then you might need more. If all you intend to do is serve simple web pages, then you could get away with less.

Bandwidth is usually a little more problematical. It is calculated on a monthly basis, unless you are in the very fortunate position of having unlimited resources. It is difficult to be absolute about bandwidth consumption, but as a ball park figure, I would suggest that your bandwidth. should be about 10 times your disk space quota. In other words, if you have 100Mb disk space quota, your bandwidth should be in the region of 1000Mb.

As time goes on and your site uses up the hosts resources, you should get plenty of warnings about quota excesses; certainly allowing you enough time to do something about it. If you find yourself in this situation, log a help ticket with your host and ask for assistance. It is possible that quota usage can be controlled with some tweaks to your host settings, so you should always ask.

In the next section, we will be looking at the features that you might require in your web site, and the sort of things that your host should be doing for you, without you even asking!

Discover more about Web Hosting Features on the next page.

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