Website hosting is more than just getting your site on the internet—it is about making sure that it succeeds. Before choosing a given hosting plan, it is important to gauge how much bandwidth your site will require such that users of the site will experience little to no downtime between pages. Potential customers and clients are likely to exit a website that does not have adequate bandwidth to handle the traffic that comes through it, so disk space and bandwidth allotments often directly correlate to the overall quality of a site.
However, it is no necessarily a simple feat to estimate these bandwidth and disk space allotments. In the first place, you should consider the major media contents of your website. Video-based websites or websites that have an extensive store of photos—such as with photograph or broadcasting sites—will certainly need more disk space to store these items and more bandwidth to deliver them to clientele. Plain or rich text, on the other hand, requires much less space than this. For enterprise-level websites for expanding companies, it is advisable to purchase a hosting plan that is versatile, allowing you to add bandwidth or disk space as you see fit.
The world of website hosting is, of course, a rather competitive marketplace. With the millions of website registered yearly, website hosting services cater to different customer bases and requests. Thus, do not go with a particular host based on price alone or on disk space capacity alone. This is sure to lead you down the wrong path: A host that can better meet a multimedia site’s needs for a higher price is better than a host that rarely deals with media at a lower price. Again, the sustainability and success of your site depends on this judgment call.
As a rule of thumb, you can guess that a website with about 10 pages and less than 7 images will come in at around 2 to 3 MB. This is fine for a personal website but rarely meets the comprehensive needs of anything greater than a small business. Additionally, any site that requires site viewers to download large-size media will require a concomitant increase in bandwidth capacity.
When constructing a website, it is best to start small and build. Begin with a well-conceived layout, fewer media items, and carefully composed text that guides your readers through your business or product. Once you maintain a certain level of web traffic, grow your site in order to further increase traffic.