The  Compass

-- Michael Raymond

How much space do you need for your website?

As a rough calculation a novel of 150,000 words, at an average of 6 letters per word will equal about a megabyte of space. In other words, unless the text on your site is as prolific as Isaac Asimov or William Shakespeare, you will probably never need more than 1Gb of storage for just text.

Obviously though, websites today, especially corporate and ecommerce sites are not just text. They have PDF files, pictures, databases, online catalogs, video and much, much more. Each of these types of files will require more space than just text, with video and sometimes databases being the largest gobblers of disk space.

In addition, if you use a webmail or browser based interface to your email, those emails that you leave on the server will be figured into your total disk space used. A bigger impact from email is usually in terms of traffic, or bandwidth used, and you may find, if not now, in the near future, that the bandwidth cost you more to maintain than the hard drive space.

The best advice I can offer is this: if you're not doing ecommerce, start with whatever entry level site your chosen hosting company provides, but avoid the free ones. These are generally cluttered with ads that you have little or no control over. If you find this is too small for either your content or traffic, move up to the next level.

If you are doing ecommerce, you should be more concerned with traffic and bandwidth usage than disk space. You need whatever size hosting package will allow you to install an SSL Certificate, a shopping cart, all the images and descriptions of your products, etc., plus give you some room to grow. Most likely, something mid-tier range from your host will be sufficient. And if not, good news for you!

Ask your host about uptime of their machines and their network. Ask them about backups for data. Ask them about frequency of updates to their systems and their software. All of these questions -- and their answers -- will mean more to your ecommerce venture than the size of your disk.

-- Michael Raymond

Once upon a time in a land called "Internet", there were few inhabitants and only a handful of places for those few inhabitants to visit. In this strange and mysterious land, most information was shared in a relatively new language called HTML.

Whole libraries of information, called websites, were delivered to your computer faster than any of the big three delivery guys can deliver packages, even now.

There were a few bastions of wizards fluent in HTML located throughout this land and the number of wizards, for a time, was greater than the number of mortal inhabitants.

One of the strongest enclaves of wizards in Internet was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These wizards listened to the discontent of the inhabitants around them and decided to assist if they could. Internet, it seems, prior to the wizards getting involved, was a land all but devoid of pictures—with only text, which proved to be rather boring and monotonous. This group of wizards … …More….