How Do I Choose a Christian Web Host?
by Gil Vidals / CEO of Truepath.com

• Do I Need 10 Gigabytes of Disk Space?
• How Much Bandwidth is Enough?

Part I: Do I Need 10 Gigabytes of Disk Space?

Searching for a web hosting company can be a daunting task  as there are so many web hosting companies today. Reports show that there are over 20,000 web hosting companies. Each one offers hundreds of different options and prices with different levels of support. In your search for the right web host, you'll come across terms like "domain alias", "virtual FTP", "URL redirector", and "content management systems". So  how do you find the right company when you're not even familiar with all the technical web jargon?

The intention of this article is for those less familiar with the technical jargon of web hosting. The article should help you make up your mind on a web hosting company that will serve your web pages to the public in a quick and stable manner.

Most web hosting plans always start off by highlighting two areas. The first concerns disk space and the second bandwidth. Disk space is more obvious for most to understand -- that is how much disk space do you need to hold your content such as web pages, emails, databases, and programs. The second, bandwidth or data transfer will be tackled in the next article.

Let's start with disk space because it's an easier concept to grasp than data transfer. Besides the disk space is what physically holds your web pages that will be displayed to your visitors. You may already be aware that disk space is measured in megabytes (millions of bytes) or gigabytes (billions of bytes). The symbol for each is MB for megabytes and GB for gigabytes. Bear with me as I get into the numbers just a little bit deeper than you care to know. One byte holds a letter. The letter or character "a", for example, requires one byte, so 1 MB or one million bytes is equivalent to one million characters.

However, people don't normally think in terms of characters; For example, when talking to a web designer that will redesign your website, you might say, "What would the cost be to redesign my ten page website?" But you would never here someone say, "What would it cost to redesign my three million byte web site?"

So let me give you a few easy numbers to remember. An average web page should be very close to 100,000 bytes in size Any larger and the page may load slower than your viewers would appreciate, so 100,000 bytes is a good web page size for you to remember while you are shopping for a web host. If you had a one hundred page site, then you would require 100 pages x 100,000 bytes or 10,000,000 bytes, which is 10 MB. The more observant will immediately understand that web hosts are offering at least 500 MB. If you are planning to have a site that is less than 100 pages, you know you'll need about 10 MB.  What if you had a site that is ten times bigger? For a 1,000 page site, you would require only 100 MB -- still far less than most entry-level hosting plans, offering a generous 500 MB!

The observant reader might already be asking, “Why are web hosts offering more than 10 times what I need?” It is true that some hosts are offering 1,000 MB of disk space, which seems excessive for even the largest web sites. The answer to this question is more complex, but it has to do with competition. Web hosts know you won't occupy that much space, but since the competitor is offering more and more space, they feel they need to keep up too. The consumer benefits, by having a huge amount of disk space, but what would you put in there?

Besides your web pages, keep in mind that email and databases also take up space. It's not at all unusual that you would receive a large volume of emails, especially if you are subscribed like me to a lot of mailing lists. It's possible if your are active on the web to use 100 MB or more of disk space just for email.

Databases also occupy disk space. A database holds information such as an address book, financial records, or something more fun like the batting averages of your favorite baseball players. The space occupied by databases is also measured in megabytes (MB).  It's hard to quantify the size of an “average” database; however, suffice it to say from experience that if you had a 100 MB database that would be a decent size.

If you want to estimate the size of the database you need, then think about how much data you will collect. For example, if you wanted to create a web directory of all your church members, you could easily figure out the size of the database. First estimate how much data you'll need for each member. Assume you had 100 church members and you will collect the following information: (1) first name at 100 characters (2) last name at 100 characters 3) Address at 200 characters and 4) phone number at 10 characters. Adding up the numbers, you can see that you will need 100+100+200+10 = 410 characters or bytes per member. Multiply 410 characters for one member x 100 church members resulting in 41,000 bytes or 41 KB (this is a tiny number less than 1 MB!)

Besides web pages, email and databases, you might consider video and audio. Video will require quite a bit of disk space, so this is a special condition that you may have to consider. For those that won't be hosting video, you should feel safe to start with 500 MB of disk space. This article doesn't dive into the issues of video or audio. I'll address this in a separate article.

You can use the disk space calculators provided for your convenience at  http://www.truepath.com/calculators.html. The calculator will quickly measure your disk space needs by answering a few basic questions.

Part II: How Much Bandwidth is Enough?

Now that you have a better idea of how much disk space you need. It's time to talk about data transfer or bandwidth. Data transfer is the amount of data you will be pushing through the internet. It's important to understand that when you are browing the web, your web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox is downloading pages from the web host to your PC. Let me say that again. Each time you view a page on the web, your computer has to down load it first. This concept might be new to you. You might have had the misconception that when you view a page, it's like looking through a window. You just look at the pretty flowers outside and that's it. But the web isn't like that. First your computer has to "take in" what you want to look at. That means it has to reach out and grab what your going to look at and copy it to your computer, then, and only then, can you see it.

The process of “grabbing” a page and copying it to your desktop is called “downloading”. Keep in mind that each page has to be downloaded along with the images that are on the page. If you have a lot of images, you're visitors are going to be waiting longer while the images are transferred down from the web host to the visitor's PC.  I mentioned earlier that emails also count. Each time you access your email that is a download as well. Each download is measured in thousands of bytes or kilobytes. The web hosting company gives you a certain amount of kilobytes that you are allowed to have in downloads per month. Entry level plans are offering huge amounts of downloads or bandwidth.

Let's calculate how much space you'll need. Let's assume again that we're talking about an average web page of 100 KB (100,000 bytes). Let's say that in one month you have 100 visitors and each visitor sees (downloads) two pages of your web site. Doing a little math, take 100 KB per web page x 1,000 visitors per month x 2 pages per visitor = 200,000 KB or 200 MB. These days an entry level plan will allow for 1,000 MB of data transfer or downloads from your website to your visitors' PCs.

Once again, the observant will ponder why do I need 1,000 MB if 200 MB seems plenty for one thousand visitors. Actually you'll need enough bandwidth to serve the population that comes to your site. The real answer can be derived by using a bandwidth calculator like the one hosted at http://www.truepath.com/calculators.html. Simply type in the number of visitors you expect per month and your average web page size as well as the number of pages you expect your visitors to view and press the “calculate” button. Your answer will be in GB per month.

Once you've estimated the amount of disk space and bandwidth you'll require from your web host, the next step is to understand the other requirements that you will need such as software applications like electronic commerce (ecommerce) web site builders, counters, traffic analysis and other tools that will make your website truly on the cutting edge and serving your visitors well.


--