Forum Moderators: phranque
Hoping someone can help me out. I currently run a few sites with a webhost that, as of late, has become absolutely pathetic...having said that, I'm looking for a new one and had a few questions about what I really need.
Ultimately I'll be looking at running about 10-15 sites for myself, and since I've started doing some freelance design, capabilities to add on as needed would be good. The host I'm currently with offers 5000mb (5Gig) of web space, and a 25GB bandwidth. I've been shopping around at other host's reseller options, and most of them don't seem to offer nearly as much (average in my price range seems to be about 2GB space and 15-20GB bandwidth). How much do I really need?
None of the sites I will be running will be anything huge like online photo galleries or anything - most of them will be regular 20 something page websites with the usual feedback forms, a few pics, message boards, etc. On one of my current sites we get about 1000 hits (approx 90-100 unique visitors) per day, so I would want to estiimate my bandwidth on that amount.
If anyone could let me know if these lower levels of space and bandwidth would seem to work for my purposes I'd really appreciate it - I really just have no idea how much space/bandwidth a typical site would use. Also if anyone out there is currently using a host they're happy with please send me a sticky.
Thanks so much,
Kelly :)
(my) webhost that... has become absolutely pathetic..
most of them (other hosts) don't seem to offer nearly as much
Offer is one thing. Deliver is another. Focus on the latter and try not to get too distracted by the former, because hosts differ in their degree of overselling. If a host gets too generous with quantity, they might have to get stingy with quality.
If you are worried about future growth, find a host with reasonable rates for additional transfer, so the revenue from your extra traffic will more than cover the extra expense.
I really just have no idea how much space/bandwidth a typical site would use.
Don't worry about typical sites if you can get a summary for your own sites. But based on the numbers provided, you probably don't need to worry. Keep in mind that there is more than one way to calculate usage, but here is the basic formula for data transfer:
Total Pages x Average Size = Data Transfer
for example = 30,000 x 30K = .9 GB
I'll take a look around keeping your tips in mind, but generally speaking would 2gig web space and 20-30gig bandwidth seem sufficient for running about 20 average size sites?
Thanks again,
Kelly :-)
As for Bandwith 20Gig should also cover that, however you should look at how easy it is to expand and grow in the future. You do not want to be stuck having to change hosts again in the future if your sites become popular.
Kelly
I run a hosting biz for small businesses, and get that very question a lot: "Space and bandwith - how much do we need?". It probably varies a lot for bigger sites, but I tell them that, honestly, the vast majority of single sites, even good-sized, busy sites, will do fine on 100MB and 2 (if not 1) GB of transfer per month. My largest, busiest personal site has 50 pages, a small (12 images, rotated periodically) picture/art gallery, a PHPBB message board, and a couple of largeish apps. Total size right now? 17.88MB, including 1.17MB in an SQL database. Yeah, we're huge. Average page size is 4k, two small images per page, no scripts, no tables or other fancy layout.
That said, we do a pretty even 2MB of traffic a day right now, slowly increasing. About 75 visitors, plus about 100-125 hits on our 12kb banner ad. Throw in a few busy weekends, a week's worth of twice-daily spidering from Inktomi, and a lot of 404 pages from worms, virii, and hackers probing for exploits, and we only once have broken 100MB transfer. Multiply that by 10-15 (the number of sites you want to have), and we're talking, what? Less than 500MB of disk space, and perhaps 2GB bandwith?
There's really no need to pay through the nose for, say, 20GB of disk space, or 100GB of bandwith... If you're looking at those sorts of resources, IMHO it's time to get your own server somewhere - but I don't think you're approaching that point yet (I sure am not).
What starts out small can become very big if it works right and a lot of hard work is put in.
We have one site that does well over 25 Gigs a month and we have never had to move hosts.
