How much disk space and bandwidth do I need to host my website?

When considering a website you’ll need to determine how much disk space and bandwidth your new site will require. You will need to determine what type of content your site will mostly consist of when making this determination. Will the content consist mostly of text? Photo images? Video files or audio files? Or will the content consist of some or all of these? Video and audio files will require the most disk space and bandwidth. Photo images would be the next in line for storage space requirements depending on the file size and the number of images being hosted. Special consideration will need to be taken into consideration when choosing a web-hosting plan.

Most hosting companies will offer various hosting packages ranging from 2GB of disk storage to unlimited amount of disk storage. However, there are always limits on the “unlimited” packages. I’ll save that discussion for another article. I’ve developed web sites that contain in excess of 300 pages, with a content consisting mostly of text and images, and the actual storage space used is approximately 80MB of disk space. 1000MB of disk space is equivalent to 1GB (1 billion bytes of storage).

Your greatest task will be determining the amount of bandwidth you’ll need. Along with consideration of bandwidth when hosting video and/or audio files as mentioned above, you will also need to consider the amount of visitors coming to your site. Think of bandwidth as a highway. The greater the amount of bandwidth the greater the number of lanes there are on your highway. If there is more traffic on your highway than there are lanes you will experience a traffic jam (bottle neck, a slowing of or stoppage in traffic) on your highway (bandwidth). Think of video and audio as rush hour, when the greatest amount of bandwidth will be used. If there is more traffic than there are lanes, the traffic will stop. Now imagine what would happen if it were like rush hour all day and night! This equates to a large number of video or audio files being uploaded or downloaded to and from your web site. If you’re feel you going to have a large number of video or audio file uploads and downloads, shared hosting is not recommended. And with most, if not all, shared hosting companies will not allow these high transfer rates.

So, how much bandwidth do I really need?

Here’s a simple calculation:

Bandwidth needed = Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors x Number of days in a month (30) x Redundant Factor
Average Daily Visitors: The total number of monthly visitors/30.
Average Page Size: The average size of your web page.
Average Page Views: The average page viewed per visitors.
Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8.

If the web site offers downloads use this calculation:

Bandwidth needed = [(Average Page Views x Average Page Size x Average Daily Visitors) + (Average Download per day x Average File Size) ] x Number of days in a month (30) x Redundant Factor
Average Daily Visitors: The total number of monthly visitors divide by 30.
Average Page Size: The average size of your web page.
Average Page Views: The average page viewed per visitors.
Average File Size: The total file size divided to the number of files.
Redundant Factor: A safety factor ranged from 1.3 – 1.8.

An example of page visits verses bandwidth usage would be:

One of the sites I developed had over 5,500 visits, over 34,000 pages and used less than 7GB of bandwidth in a single month. This may not considered a huge site but for the majority of small to mid-size business and personal websites the concern for overages, slow downs, or stoppages are remote. Some web-hosting providers do not set arbitrary disk space and bandwidth usage referred to “unlimited hosting.” These are usually very affordable and offer a worry free experience.

A quality provider will be more than happy to assistance with your bandwidth and disk storage requirements.

August, 2011
Dave M.