Finding the Perfect Balance of Disk Space and Bandwidth

You will find thousands of articles online stressing the importance of disk space and bandwidth. Many hosting companies will try to persuade you into buying the package that offers the highest allowance of both. Having a large amount is good but do you really need it?. If you are not sure, you need to find out how to carefully balance the two.

In order to estimate how much disk space and bandwidth you need, you should first determine what type of website you will have. In general, small business sites fall into one of the following classifications.

Mini-sites - Also referred to as one-product sites, min-sites are small and usually consist of two to three pages. The main focus of such a site is to sale a single product or collect contact information from visitors and try to market products to them at a later time. This is the type of site you often find with a lengthy sales letter along with an order form and contact page.

Brochure Site – A brochure site typically has about 10 web pages that describe what the business does. It goes over their products and services, location and targeted market among other details. The site might also contain a contact page, an about page and other pages where items can be purchased. These sites get their name because they essentially act as the company’s online brochure.

Theme-based Site - This type of website revolves around a specific niche market or topic. It could be a site dedicated to freelance writers, web hosting or work-at-home moms. These sites usually receive frequent updates and contain articles, tutorials and other resources. A theme-based site can either sell its own products, items from affiliates or simply exist to provide a lot information.

Each website classification has different disk space and bandwidth requirements.

A mini-site usually does not require an enormous amount of disk space. On the other hand, if it starts to gain popularity through effective search engine optimization, affiliate promoting or word of mouth, it will likely generate more traffic. In this instance, the amount of bandwidth becomes crucial.

A brochure site does not require a lot of disk space or bandwidth. This is the average small business site, one that can get by with the basic offerings of a good web hosting provider.

A theme-based site usually does not require that much disk space or bandwidth. In the beginning that is. If this is a website that truly requires frequent updates, the requirements for disk space can increase quite fast. Moreover, once you add more content and generate more traffic, your needs for data transfer will also increase.

Regardless of what type of site you have in mind for your small business, it is a good rule of thumb to expect the unexpected and take the future into account from day one. The best thing you can do in any event is to make sure your host doesn’t charge ungodly amounts for overages and provides an easy path to service upgrades.