Consideration of the Space Requirements for Your Web Site

How much is TOO Much?

Over the past 5-6 years I have assisted a number of people in setting up their personal or small business websites. When it comes time to decide on the web hosting plan they require, one of the first questions that comes up is "how much storage space do I need?". My stock answer to that question has become "enough to hold your content". That is not intended to be a flippant response.

To a large extent, the question of storage space for most personal or small business sites has become somewhat irrelevant. Storage space has become irrelevant??? Ray, are you KIDDING??? Actually, I'm not. The fact of the matter is that the plans offered by most web hosting companies provide more than enough storage space, even with the less expensive options.

Let's consider an example. Many hosting companies (at least the good ones), offer 5GB or more even with their least expensive plans. That's 5 GIGABYTES. That is a heck of alot of space. Of course, you can certainly find a few companies that offer considerably less for a higher price, but why on earth would you host with them in the first place?

So just how much storage is 5 GB? Let's think about that for a minute. Say you are creating a web site that uses both graphics and photos as part of the design along with your text content. Let's further say that the average size of the pages on your web site is 250K. Now, that is WAY to large for a single page much less an average page size for your site. You would quickly lose your dial-up visitors, and even some using broadband. I'll cover "best practices" for page optimization in another article, but for now, let's use the excessively large 250K/page average.

Do you know how many 250K pages you could have with 5GB of storage space? The answer is 20,000. 20,000 PAGES!! How many sites do you know that have 20,000 pages?? Not many. Even a site with 1,000 pages is relatively large. Our focus for this article is people who want a personal or small business web site. We aren't talking about The New York Times or ESPN. They would hardly be using a low-to-mid level hosting plan would they?

A number of years ago I built a web site for a friend who owns a marina. We included pages for all the services he offers such as boat storage, tackle and equipment, boat repair, rentals, motel, and so on. We included a fairly large number of photos to give people a good idea of what was available. There is also a "hall of fame" section with photos of some of the larger fish his guests have caught over the years. His site, with text HTML, graphics and photos totals around 20Mb.

Perhaps you want to have a few applications on your site that utilize backend databases such as MS-Access or MySQL. How is that going to affect your space requirements?? Not that much actually. Consider this: a 20Mb Access or MySQL database is on the large side for most typical applications. If you had 50 such databases on your site (and how often do you see that?), those 50 databases at 20Mb each would total just 1 GB of storage space. You could have 1,000 pages and 50 databases and still NOT use even half of the 5GB of available storage.

When considering the hosting plan you require for your site, my recommendation is to focus on other considerations such as bandwidth requirements, number of email accounts required, number of database connections required (rather than their size) and so on. I'll cover all of those in future articles. But when it comes to selecting a hosting plan, in most cases, as long as that plan offers 2 GB or more of storage, the amount of hard drive space becomes a nonfactor for the vast majority of site requirments.

And by the way, you shouldn't be paying more than $5-$6/month for such a plan.

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