- One-product website
(mini-site): Usually a very small site with two or three pages; its focus is to
sell just one product, or to collect visitors' email addresses to try to sell
them at a later date. This kind of site is usually just a long sales letter plus
an order page and a contact page.
- Company brochure site:
Usually around 10 or so pages describing what the company does, its products or
services, its location, the markets it targets, an about us page, a contact
page, etc. It is basically an online brochure of the company.
- Theme-based site:
Revolves around a very specific topic or market niche (for example: work-at-home
moms), and is updated frequently with new articles, tutorials and resources.
These sites can also sell products from affiliate companies, or sell their own
products.
Each of these sites has different web space and
bandwidth requirements.
- A one product website doesn't
need a lot of web space. However, if the site ranks well with the search engines
or has a large number of affiliates promoting it, it will generate a lot of
traffic and the data transfer allowance will become very important.
- A company brochure site
doesn't need a lot of web space or bandwidth. For this kind of site, a basic
package offered by a reputable host is usually more than enough.
- A theme-based site won't
probably need a lot of web space or bandwidth at the beginning. However, if the
site is updated frequently with new articles and resources, its web space
requirements will increase. Also, as the site gets more traffic and offers more
content, the data transfer allowance will also become important. You must plan
for the future from day one, and get more web space and data transfer than you
seem to need at the beginning.
Here are some examples of how you can estimate
and calculate your web space and data transfer requirements (we will assume that
the average size of a web page, including pictures, is 50 Kilobytes).
One-product Site
If your one product site has just three pages,
it will just need 150 Kilobytes of web space (a drop in the bucket considering
that basic packages nowadays offer upwards of 50 Megabytes of space). However,
if it receives 150,000 page views per month it will require approximately 7.5
Gigabytes / month of data transfer.
Company Brochure Site
If your company brochure site has 10 pages, it
will only need 500 Kilobytes (aprox. 0.5 Megabytes) of web space. If it has 5000
page views per month, it will need 250 Megabytes (aprox. 0.25 Gigabytes) of data
transfer per month.
Theme Based Site
If your theme-based site starts off with 50 web
pages of content, it will need 2.5MB of web space. However, if you add ten pages
of new content per week, you will need 26 Megabytes more in your first year.
After two years, you will need 52 Megabytes, and so forth. As you see, your need
for space may add up pretty quickly. If we estimate that your site will have
30000 page views per month, its monthly bandwidth consumption will be 1,500
Megabytes (approximately 1.5 Gigabytes). This figure will most likely grow as
you add more pages.
Your space and data transfer needs will also
grow dramatically if you offer large files for download. For example, if you
give away a 1 Megabyte PDF E-book and 1,000 people download it in a given month,
you will need 1 Gigabyte of data transfer just for that one particular download
(and you still haven't accounted for the data transfer consumed when users
access and browse your site!).
Since web hosts will usually charge you fees if
you use more than your allotted web space and bandwidth, you must carefully
monitor your consumption of both. However, you should pay extra attention to
your bandwidth.
The reason is that it is easier to control your
web space use (after all, it is you who decide how many files to load up to your
host's server). Data transfer, on the other hand, is not as easily controlled.
For example, your site may suddenly get a good search engine ranking for a
popular search term and receive a traffic boost, which will consume more
bandwidth than you had originally planned. Or, unscrupulous webmasters may
"steal" bandwidth from you by linking directly to images on your server, instead
of saving them in their own web server space.
Therefore, it is wise to plan for the
unexpected, by making sure that your host doesn't charge unreasonable fees every
time you exceed your web space and data transfer allowance, and that it offers a
free and easy way to upgrade to a better hosting package whenever the need
arises.
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