That's a basic question. People get confused about offers like 50MB space @ $9.95/mo, 500MB space at $19.95/mo...even Unlimited space at $49.95 etc, and actually pay more. Let me explain below, how you pay more or compromise with other things by going to those website providers.

At first, let's talk about how to derive the volume of space you need. For this, you need to chalk out how many pages (links) you will have. Let's assume that you need 10 pages to host.

So, in your website, you'll have :

• 10 HTML pages
• 10 link buttons
• 1 logo
• 1 banner
• 10 photographs (let's assume you have one photograph for each page)

To make a site load faster (within 15-20 secs), you must be careful about the total weight (in KB) of the contents of a page. A page should weigh less than 100K including all graphics and images in it. On standard conditions graphics/photographs should not weigh more than:
15K for a photograph
15K for a logo
10K for a banner
02K for each link button

For the HTML file (filename.html), 10K is quite enough. This will carry text of more than 1 A4/letter size page.

So in this example, each page of yours weigh :
15K for the photograph
15K for the logo
10K for the banner
20K for 10 buttons
10K for the HTML file
70K in total

Then for 10 pages, do you occupy 10 x 70KB = 700KB space? No. You occupy much less than that, because, your banner, logo and link buttons are common to all the pages!

Now in this example, the server space you actually occupy is:
100K for 10 HTML files @ 10K each
150K for 10 Photographs @ 15K each
 15K for the logo (remaining common)
 10K for the banner (remaining common)
 20K for 10 buttons (remaining common)
295K in total!!

You can accommodate your website in a 2MB web-host with IndNet.Net which costs only $5.95/mo. Now you know how actually you pay $4 more each month in offers like 50MB Server @ $9.95/mo and get cheated?

Now let's come to the point of 'Traffic' which is equally important while selecting your web-hosting plan.

What is Traffic or Bandwidth? In layman's language, according to my example above, when a visitor visits your website and views your first page (index page), he generates a traffic of 70K. If he visits all the 10 pages, he will generate 700K Trafiic if each of your pages weighs 70K.

Now, how will you know about the number of visitors in a month? There's a basic thumb rule. Only 2% of your visitors visit all of your pages (mostly your own visits or visits of your friends/relatives). 80% of the visitors leave after visiting the index page. Balance 18% people visit 3 pages on an average.

So, you need to first assume (yes assume) how many visitors you may get in a day. To be very frank and with no intention to hurt you, a new website with proper search engine listings and promotion gets around 10 visitors/day, a 6-12 month old website gets around 50 visitors/day. These are the figures for a business website. A typical small to medium sized corporate or company website receives less than 25 visitors/day. I have derived into these figures after going through the data of my server since last 3 years. Of course, I'm not talking about exceptionally popular websites, portals etc. which get much more hits per day.

If you trust my figures, let's go ahead with it to derive how much traffic you're going to consume in a month. So, in our example, you have a new website with 10 pages in it, each of your pages weighs 70K and you get 10 visitors/day, ie, 300 visitors in a month.

16,800K -->Traffic generated by 80% visitors (index page only)
11,340K -->Traffic generated by 18% visitors (3 page visits)
0,4200K -->Traffic generated by 02% visitors (10 page visits)
-------
28,140K -->Total traffic in a month = 27.5MB

Therefore, you can assume that for every 10 visitors in a day, you generate 27.5MB traffic in a month. So, with a 2MB Web-host account with IndNet.Net, you can actually have 50 such visitors in a day (27.5MB x 5 = 137.5MB). With a 5MB Web-host approx 100 visitors, a 10MB Web-host--200 visitors and 25MB Web-host--300 visitors/day. You should start with a low account size and gradually upgrade to higher account according to your needs.

So, while designing your pages, you need to concentrate upon :
(a) using optimized images which are small in byte-sizes but good in qualities
(b) avoid using big background images
(c) place maximum information in the index page.
(d) link banner/advertisements from vendors' servers, so that your server do not generate traffic for these.

Remember, it's our moral responsibilities to not to misuse internet traffic. If 100,000 websites reduce traffic generation by only 100K a day, they actually save 10,000MB traffic a day, which will help all of us to have faster internet access.

You'll find very limited web host providers offer web spaces in small sizes (like 2MB) (excepting our followers :). Actually, most of the small and medium sized business and corporate web sites do not require more than what IndNet.Net offers in their 2MB Web-host account.

So, I hope, you now understand what you should look for and what not. You should not look for per MB cost of an offer, rather you should roughly calculate how much space you really need to occupy and how much traffic you are going to generate, on the basis of the thumbrule I mentioned earlier, and look for the offers closer to your requirements. You will ultimately save money.

Thank you for reading this article.

Subhendu Sen
CEO, IndNet.Net

Note: This HTML page contains : 1 HTML File (1000 words, 6.5K) and 1 image (3.5K)--Total 10K. So, every time a visitor visits this page, my server generates 10K of traffic.