How Much Hosting Space Do You Need?

Many web hosts try to sell you a large amount of web hosting space that then costs you a lot each month. However, you may not need this much space. Have you ever calculated just how much disc space (MB) your web site uses? Do you really need an expensive hosting solution for your web site?

How Do You Calculate The File Size Of Your Web Site?
1. First you need to understand how file size is measured. The smallest unit on a computer is a bit. One bit is one electronic on or off pulse. 8 bits strung together make one byte. One byte of information can put a letter, such as “B” on your screen.

If you put 1024 bytes together and then you have one unit of information called a kilobyte. Put 1024 kilobytes together and you have a megabyte. (Most floppy disks hold around 1.4 megabytes of information). Most of your graphics and web pages are measured in bytes or kilobytes.

2. To determine your total site file size, right click on the root folder where your web site is housed – this will not only give you the total site size but also how many files and folders are contained in your site.

3. If you use an editor, such as FrontPage, go to the reports view, click on the site summary and you will get a reading of the total site file size. In Dreamweaver, just use the method in No 2.

If you put 1024 bytes together and then you have one unit of information called a kilobyte. Put 1024 kilobytes together and you have a megabyte. (Most floppy disks hold around 1.4 megabytes of information). Most of your graphics and web pages are measured in bytes or kilobytes.

2. To determine your total site file size, right click on the root folder where your web site is housed – this will not only give you the total site size but also how many files and folders are contained in your site.

3. If you use an editor, such as FrontPage, go to the reports view, click on the site summary and you will get a reading of the total site file size. In Dreamweaver, just use the method in No 2.

Prepare To Expand Your Hosting Plan
You may want to add pages, graphics, features eg scripts, databases etc, to your site in the future. Begin with a small hosting plan at first (even 5mb is enough to start out with), and then expand it as you add new features.

Check with your web host, if you can easily upgrade your hosting plan as you grow your site. You don’t want to go through the hassle of changing hosts every few months.

Should you take a hosting package with 100MB space or one with 3000MB space?
This depends on the kind of web site you want to develop. For example, if you envisage a web site with lots of large files (such as music or video), you would definitely need larger web space than the average web site. Let us now look at some figures.

A web page should ideally be less than 20kb, and that is only the HTML. If we include external JavaScript file (average 2kb), external Cascading Style Sheets file (average 2kb), and embedded images (not more than 50 kb), the total size of the web page becomes 74kb. And if your web site has a hundred pages, it would require 7.5MB. So it hardly makes a difference if you take hosting with 100MB or 3000MB - the question being, would you ever utilize all the space provided by your web host?

On the other hand, if you are planning to have downloadable music and video files which are generally large files, I suggest that you work out an estimate size and procure hosting that has at least twice the file size (to be prepared for the future).

Once you have determined your total site file size, check what hosting plan you have purchased and how much disc space has been allocated for your site. If you are only using 3mb of disc space but are paying for 100mb, then you may want to switch hosting plans and save yourself a ton of money each year. Just remember that this total space also includes email messages as well, so you have to think about space requirements for them as well.