Basic Features of Business Web Site Hosting Services
Don't worry about it; whatever they offer should be more than enough for most businesses.
If you need more -- you put up tons of product pictures, or decide to offer video tours, or get into e-commerce and catalogs and other options that eat up a lot of disk space -- they'll sell you more. Check the hosting service's menu of prices to see how much more it will cost to, say, double the basic offering. Consider that your upside risk of future success.
If you don't like that answer, or you are going for a more ambitious site, here are some rough-and-ready approaches to figuring out your hard drive space needs:
- If you have a site already, just look at the amount of disk space the entire thing takes up on your local drive.
- If not, but you have most of your graphics already, add that up because that will take more space than anything. If you have twice that much disk space, you're probably fine.
- If your site will need a large database -- for tracking user registration, for example, or to hold your product listings -- see how big that file is if you've got the data already. If not, then use Excel, Access, or another database or spreadsheet program, create the fields of data you'll need, and add fake filler data. Then see how big the file is.
- If you are planning to go big into e-commerce, there's no way to calculate in advance very well. Just get a big 2-gig service, and see what they charge when you need more room.
These methods aren't bulletproof, but they will give you a start at gauging which of the many packages offered you ought to buy.
Bandwidth to the Internet
Every time somebody visits your site, the pages they visit and the graphics on those pages are sent to the visitor's browser. The more visitors you have, and also the more kilobytes of text and pictures that are on your pages, the more stuff goes back and forth on the Internet, and therefore the more bandwidth you're using.
Since the Web hosting service pays for access to the Internet, every hosting service has some upper limit on the amount of bandwidth you can use, given as the number of gigabytes downloaded from your site each month by your visitors. Generally you get plenty of bandwidth, especially for a basic business Web site.
If for some reason you become the hot new pancake house, mentioned on national TV or involved in some improbable scandal, and everybody rushes to see your site, you might run out of bandwidth and have to pay to get more. But not likely. There is no easy way to calculate in advance how much bandwidth you'll use, but again, the Web host will sell you more if you need it.
