What is web hosting?

 

Simply put, web hosting is when someone sells a place on their server for people to place their web sites. Another way to think of web hosting is virtual real estate. Just as you may rent a home to live in, you can rent a 'home' for your web site.

 

What is web space and how much do I need?

 

Web space is a measurement of how much hard drive space you get with your web hosting plan. You can think of it as being the same as space on your hard drive, because it is only hard drive space -- even if it is on someone elses hard drive.

 

How much space do I need?

The question of how much you need is a little harder to answer. If you are someone who has a lot of very large pictures, say 100 - 10 Megabyte pictures for a total of 1,000 megabytes -- or 1 Gigabyte -- then you are going to need at least that much space if you want all of them up at the same time. However, it has been our experience that the average person never goes over 25 Megabytes and the average small business never goes over 75 Megabytes.

 

So to determine how much web space you will need first you have to look at how many graphics that you have to put up. Let's say that you have 20 graphics and they average 25 Kilobytes in size. That will be 500 Kilobytes, or one half of a megabyte.

 

Next you need to decide how many pages your site will need. For an individual, this can be only one or two. For a business, we suggest a minimum of five pages -- home, about us, contact us, products (or services) and prices. A very heavy text web page is 10K so the five pages that a business site will take is only 50 Kilobytes.

 

Add these two together and we get 550 Kilobytes, or just over one-half of a megabyte. Of course every page that you add will add to that total. Just think, in this example, this entire web site would fit on one floppy disk.

 

This is an extreme example of what can be done. Most web sites now come in at around 100 Kilobytes just for the site elements. Even at that, our example site would still come in at well under 5 Megabytes.

 

What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth is a measurement of how much data you have transfered during the month. Most people think that since their web site takes up 100 Kilobytes, and their hosting plan gives them 1 Gigabyte of bandwidth that they will only be able to have 10,000 visitors during the month. That may or may not be true. If your visitors visit one web page and leasve, that leaves the remainder of the 100 Kilobytes for someone else. Conversely, if you have a visitor that visits every page of your site two times, then that lessens the bandwidth available for someone else.

 

However, both of those scenarios are rather rare. Most of your visitors are going to fall somewhere in the middle. So some months you may use 700 Megabytes of your bandwidth allocation, other months you may only use 300 Megabytes. Either way in these examples, if you have one Gigabyte of bandwidth per month, you would be fine.