It’s easy to become confused about web space. Many web hosts offer such a range of packages, you may buy one with larger space for your website than you actually need.
The amount of disk space needed depends greatly on the type of website. One with hundreds of large audio and video files, for example, will consume more space than a simple site with five or six pages. E-commerce websites also usually have large numbers of individual product pages with high-quality pictures to describe products, taking up considerably more space than a blog with lots of words but limited graphics.
Personal websites often begin by using no more than 10-25 MB. The text usually occupies just a tiny fraction of the web space: 500 pages use approximately 1 MB. Images take up far more room. As a rule of thumb, an image takes up 80 KB of space, but in practice, many images are smaller than this. For information, 1000 KB equals 1 MB. A 200 GB website can, therefore, have images and graphics related to the website’s construction; plenty of photos and a lot of text.
Basically the more advanced and media rich your web site is, the more disk space and probably bandwidth you’ll need.
A website needs more web space when you have multimedia features such as sound and video. The amount you’ll require varies. Your sound and audio files will give their sizes in either KB or MB. Another popular addition to a website is to create a blog.
In addition to the content on your web pages, you need to consider any back-end web hosting features you’ll need. We mentioned email accounts and email storage files above, but you’ll also need to account for database software and web apps such as shopping cart software, contact forms, secure payment processing, traffic logs and counters, and guest books, among other things. The more features you plan to incorporate into your website, the more disk space you will need. These applications range in size, so you should determine which you’ll be using before calculating your total requirements.
What about traffic? Is 1GB enough then?
High traffic e-commerce websites will consume considerably more than their disk space levels every month in traffic, as they log in to update their products and customers view products, make orders and for downloadable products stores download software, fonts etc. A lot of our online store customers use between 2-5GB of traffic per month, with high-end customers using between 10-20GB. If you are purchasing your own e-commerce hosting for a shop, look for a provider offering limits in these ranges depending on how many customers you expect to receive.
But for standard personal or business websites which do not offer e-commerce, 1-3GB of data transfer will usually be more than enough to handle thousands of browser visits per month.
Calculation of Disk Space
All the data for your website will get stored on the hard disk space of your system if you are building your website on Windows operating system.
In case, you are yet to start building your page, you need to guess the amount of disk space it is going to occupy. HTML or Hypertext Markup language files are the basic programming files of your website. The optimum size of the HTML file may not be more than 25 – 30 KB, so if your website has a hundred pages, the size goes to 2.5 to 3 MB. Now let us add some image files of 12 KB each, let us say 30 in number, it will contribute to your website’s space by another 3.6MB. Let us add on 5 MB more for CSS, JavaScript files, and email accounts. After considering future scaling options, we have arrived at 13 MB website space. Space will vary if it is a flash website.
This was a guesswork to an extent; let us make an effort to arrive at approximate disk space.
Before guessing or working out on the disk space the following questions should be answered in order to understand the basics of your website.
- Know your website falls in which category (Personal blog, Company blog, e-commerce etc.)
- The size of your webpage
- Types of files you will be having on your website.
- What is your future plan regarding the website.
- Number of individual pages you are going to use for your website.
The Unlimited Hosting Myth
Almost all the web hosts are hysteric about offering unlimited disk space to users saying that they are offering it at the lowest ever rates. It is basically, your own judgement whether to fall prey to the word “unlimited”.
For more info read our article on: Is Unlimited Hosting really Unlimited?
