How much web hosting space and bandwidth do you really need for your website?
One of our commitments to our customers is that we will never force our products/service on you just for the sake of selling these. We try our best to match your requirement with the products and services we offer and fit the one that best fits your needs. We have been selling our hosting services both in the local market and in the international market since 2006 and we have been slowly building a set of loyal customers for these services. One of the frequent questions that we have had to answer was
"How much web space and bandwidth do you really need for a website".
This is a tough question to answer without really knowing what you are going to put up on the site and how many are going to visit it. In any case here are the general tips and guidelines that we offer our customers.
Hosting Account Space
These days marketing and communication teams are thinking about how to create the best personalized digital experience for their target audience. Many people are already there on the bandwagon of Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) .
We normally recommend Wordpress for very basic website needs and Drupal for those who are looking for a more engaging personalized journey for their target audience.
A typical installation of a WebCMS for a medium size website with content and images, and not much video can easily take a 100MB. Nowadays most basic hosting plans come with a few GB of space, so it will work. How much more space you would, need would depend on a few of things - mainly images, audio and video files. Another factor which people fail to consider is the space requirements for mail accounts. If you have lots of videos to upload, it is recommended to use something like Vimio or Gumlet.
Space required for hosting images
For one it would depend on the number of images that you are going to store on the site. People sometimes enquire about the possibility of posting high-resolution photos on their websites. With the high resolution devices people have, it is recommended to provide the maximum resolution possible to the visitors so that the quality of the image do not get degraded when viewing in a high-resolution device. With picture tags and responsive images, it is now possible to deliver more than one size of the image. Also tools like Cloudflare can dynamically optimize the size of the image based on the device the users are using. If you have a lot of high-resolution images, you can think of using a low-cost hosting solution like AWS s3 or similar systems.
Space required for hosting audio and video
Small and medium websites also cannot really afford to host massive content like video and audio on their sites directly. Instead they can utilize the free media hosting websites like Youtube. Even if these sites are able to squeeze these media files into the hosting spaces the massive bandwidth requirement that is going to come from users viewing these media files are normally beyond the range of common hosting packages. Most of the Free Software CMSes support some kind of plugin that will allow you to access these media files from other sites and show them directly on your website without them having to visit these external sites. The only downside would be that the viewers will normally be offered an option to visit the hosting sites by these plugins. We normally recommend small and medium website owners to go for one of these options when they have to host media content.
Using GSuite as your Mail Server and saving on hosting space
Providers like Google offer business email service, if you use that the space needed for email on your hosting service can be reduced. This allows Small and Medium website users to directly opt for using Google as their mail server and save on their hosting bills. This option offers the possibility of using the safe and secure mail service offered by Google and at the same time retaining your identity by using your own domain name. If you need to configure your domain to use Google Mail Server do get in touch with us and we will be able to help you with this.
Hosting Account Monthly Bandwidth Limit
More important than the hosting account size requirements are the bandwidth requirements for your site. But calculating this is pretty straightforward. Typical web pages generated using such CMS frameworks have sizes around a few MB in size including images. Unless you have a very high traffic website - say 100K visitors per day, you do not need to worry too much about bandwidth. You can always use a service like cloudflare to cache the webpages and optimize the delivery.
Our services
We help Marketing and Communication teams of organizations in creating digital experiences for their target audience. Technology is our area of competency and our ability to understand business needs and exposure to the world of marketing help us serve our customers in the best way possible.
