how Much storage space and Bandwidth Do you need for your site?

storage:


Websites are made up of fi les: HTML fi les, image fi les, video fi les, document files, and so on. How much storage you need on the web server depends on the types and amounts of files you’ll have on your site. You
want to make sure you think ahead—you might not have many files now, but they can add up quickly.

Suppose that you have a blog in which you’re planning to upload lots of photos and some videos. Let’s do the math for one year’s activities:

1. Blogging software and database = 20MB
2. 5 × 1.5MB photos per week = 390MB
3. 1 × 5MB video every two weeks = 130MB
4. Total after 1 year = 540MB (about half a gigabyte)

From this rough calculation, you’d want a web hosting account with at least 1GB of storage space. Fortunately, these days that’s a fairly basic starting point for storage limits, even for low-priced hosting. Often
you’ll get much more for the money.

Bandwidth:
Whenever people visit your site, they’re downloading fi les (such as HTML fi les, images, and so on) so their browser can display the site. Web hosting providers track all this downloading based on the number of bytes of data, and the monthly total of all this traffic is referred to as your bandwidth.

In the blogging example, with all the photos and videos, each visitor would use a good deal of bandwidth when viewing the site. You want more visitors coming to your site, but keep in mind that this means you’re using more bandwidth. So you want to make sure that your hosting account has sufficient bandwidth to meet your needs or projected needs.

As with storage, bandwidth costs have dropped dramatically in recent years, so you can get plenty of bandwidth for very little money. For a basic business website without a lot of images or documents
such as PDFs, and several thousand visitors per month, you might get away with 1GB or so of bandwidth. But of course, the more you can get for your money, the better —you never know when your promotional
eff orts will pay off and you’re swamped with visitors.

Having lots of bandwidth doesn’t mean your site can’t get overloaded with traffic. That’s because the bandwidth everyone talks about is actually a total data transfer limit over a one-month period. Technically,
bandwidth is the rate at which data can be transferred at any given moment.

If you think of data fl owing through a pipe, bandwidth is the diameter (the bigger the pipe, the more that can fl ow through in any given moment). But any pipe has a limit. So if your website is featured in a national media outlet, and tens of thousands of people flood your site all at once, it won’t matter how much monthly data transfer you’ve got; you can overload the bandwidth (pipe) and slow down your site or crash the
server.