How much web space is right for ME?

By Kristian

If you have started to search for a web host, you may notice that they offer packages with a variety of amounts of web space. It may be confusing and leave you wondering how much web space you really need. The truth is for many websites (especially personal sites), packages include much more web space than you will ever need or use. You can come up with a rough idea, however, of how much space you need.

Many personal websites are as small as only 2-3 MB. Therefore, if you went with a smaller plan with around 25MB you would have plenty of web space with room to grow. On average many small business websites use between 20 and 75MB of disk space. This just gives you a starting point when considering the amount of web space that you should have for your website.

It is usually recommended that each page of your website not be more than 50K. This is a good size for a page and makes it possible for the page to be loaded in a very short amount of time when visitors view your site. To get a basic idea of how much web space your website would use if it’s a pretty basic site figure out how many pages will be include in your website. You can then multiply that number by 50K to approximate how much space your site will utilize.

For websites that are going to have many images and multimedia, consider how much of these will be included on your website. Images that you use should not be much more than 15K. You must also consider whether your site uses message boards, if you offer downloads, and what other multimedia and interactive features your website will have. The more of these features your website utilizes, the more web space you will need.

You will need to consider the size of each graphic, any databases and so forth to decide how much web space you will need to support those items. Always allow some room for expansion and growth of your website in the future. If you already have a website and are simply changing hosts, you can take a look at how much space you use now. Once again allow room for growth and you will have a pretty good idea of how much web space to purchase.

Many small business websites use between 100MB and 1GB of space. The average small business website will fall somewhere in between. For very large business websites, several gigabytes may be needed. For this reason, big businesses sometimes need to use dedicated server hosting so that only their website will be on a single server.

These are just some basic guidelines to give you a starting point when considering web space. You can often change your hosting plan if you find that you need more web space or as your site continues to grow.

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