How much hosting disk space and bandwidth do you need?

Any hosting customer is allocated a specific amount of hard disk space on the server they are buying. This allotment is for those components which include your website: html files, pictures, flash files, databases, etc. Email accounts, raw access logs, and any installed programs or scripts are also added to the total.

Ever wondered, How much space does it all take-up?

The amount of disk space depends on the kind of website.

The one with hundreds of audio and video files will take more space than a site with five to six pages.

E-commerce websites also generally have large numbers of individual product pages with good quality pictures to define products, taking comparatively more space than a blog with lots of words or graphics.

The Disk Space and Bandwidth

A disk space is the amount of storage space that is needed for your website. The disk space is provided in so many ways like by Web hosting provider, it can perhaps be on the dedicated server, or you can even go for virtual private server (VPS).

Bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred through the website at one particular time. It has a user attribute attached where the disk space need is only based on the owner’s point of view.

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 guess work 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 to understand the basics of your website.

• Know your site falls into which category (Personal blog, Company blog, eCommerce, etc.)
• The size of your web page
• Types of files you will be having on your website.
• What is your future plan regarding a website?
• Some individual pages you are going to use for your site.
• Category of your website

Web sites are primarily categorized as:

• Simple websites having HTML text files and having static content
• Having minimal data, simple static websites do not require much web space.
• Websites have dynamic content with image files, audio video files along with scripts in the programming language.
• These types of websites need optimal data space due to the presence of dynamic content, images, audio, video files along with scripts.
• Personal blog kind of websites
• Blogs mostly have content regarding text and sometimes may have images or video files
• E-Commerce websites: E- Commerce websites are a hub of information exchange wherein the products can be seen by the consumer displayed on the website. This needs high resolution of image files in place which may, in turn, increase the data space usage of the website.
• Web sites which are exclusively for music or videos
• Web sites dedicated to music or videos are a different genre of web pages and have huge data space requirement.
• Number of individual pages in use

For blogs, some pages you will be using at a time will be less as compared to E-Commerce website. To approach to the exact size of your website, you need first to arrive at the number of individual pages you are going to need for your site.

Bandwidth Calculation

Bandwidth means the amount of data that is being consumed by your visitors on the site which is most often calculated on a monthly basis. Now let’s explain the way to tentatively assess it with a simple example:

Let’s suppose you have an XYZ website which has five web pages. Let’s consider each web page has identical web files which means their file size is similar too. 

Now let’s pick one of the pages and make the calculation which will apply to all other since they are identical. Let us consider one of the pages i.e. home pages. Suppose it has 10kb of text information, five pictures of 40KB file size each. Now the total files size is 10 + 5*40 = 210KB.

Now the total files size is 10 + 5*40 = 210KB.

This means each time a visitor loads a page; he is consuming 210kb of data. Now, if each user who comes to your site visits three pages in Avg. then each user will consume = 3 * 210KB = 630 KB of bandwidth.

If each day 1000 visitors make visit to your website, then in a month the bandwidth consumed will be = 630(data consumed by each visitor)*1000(visitors)*30(days) = 18900000KB = 18.9 GB

In above case, we need a plan with 25GB bandwidth to be on a safe side.

Now suppose, you have uploaded a pdf file (think the size of 20MB) as your company’s digital brochure and made it available for download. 

Suppose, if each day 40 visitors downloaded that file, in a month, it’s going to consume = 20*40*30=24000MB = 24GB of bandwidth. Here you can see pdf file is consuming the considerate amount of bandwidth even with fewer visitors. The reason is its file size.

Here you can see pdf file is consuming the considerate amount of bandwidth even with fewer visitors. The reason is its file size.

When you put all these factors together, you’ll come close to understanding the space requirements you’ll need to get started. Think about how your site will grow (pages, products, visitors) and make an educated guess as to what that means for the short term. 

Don’t worry, however, if you’re off target. Most hosting companies will allow you to upgrade your space needs as necessary.