Website Hosting Performance

First, determine the disk space and bandwidth you need.

Disk Space Size?

Small to medium-sized websites typically require at least 10MB to 100MB of disk space.

If you only consider HTML pages, their average size is quite small, perhaps even less than 1KB. However, if you look at the sizes of images used on the pages, you'll find that most images are much larger than the pages themselves.

Adding images and other space-consuming elements, each page can occupy 5KB to 50KB of server space.

If you plan to use a lot of images and graphic elements (excluding audio and video files), you may need more disk space.

Before choosing a provider, first clarify the disk space you need.

Monthly Bandwidth

Small to medium-sized websites typically require at least 1GB to 5GB of data transfer per month.

You can calculate this by multiplying the average page size by the expected monthly page views. If your average page size is 30KB and the expected page views are 50,000, then you need 0.03MB x 50,000 = 1.5GB.

Larger commercial sites usually consume no less than 100GB of bandwidth per month.

Before signing a contract with a hosting provider, you need to clarify the following:

• What is the monthly bandwidth limit?
• Will the website be shut down if the limit is exceeded?
• Will there be additional charges if the limit is exceeded?
• Is the hosting easily upgradable?

Connection Speed

Visitors usually access your website using a modem, but hosting providers have much higher connection speeds.

In the early days of the Internet, a T1 connection was considered very fast. Today's connection speeds are much faster.

1 byte equals 8 bits (the number of bits used to transmit a character), and a low-speed modem can transmit about 14,000 to 56,000 bits per second (14 to 56 kilobits per second), which is about 2,000 to 7,000 characters per second, or roughly 1 to 5 pages of text.

A kilobit (Kb) is 1,024 bits. A megabit (Mb) is 1,024 kilobits. A gigabit (Gb) is 1,024 megabits.

Here are the connection speeds currently used on the Internet:

Before signing a contract, try visiting other websites on the provider's server and talking to other customers.