Hosting Your Website - Disc Space and Data Transfer

In search of that perfect web hosting provider many webmasters are concerned with two important factors of the possible hosting plan: disc space and data transfer. Today many web hosting providers offer more and more of disc space as well as data transfer- two major needs when it comes to any website in the universe. You need disc space to store your website and you need data transfer to allow people to visit your website.

Disc Space. When it comes to web hosting space, process of using it is very simple. The more files you upload to your server the more space you use. Every time you upload new picture, web page or text file certain amount of web space is used to store these files on the server. An average HTML page requires about 90 MB-130 MB of space on your server. This is not including image files. One of the ways to save on disc space usage is to use smaller images.

Data Transfer. When it comes to data transfer required for your website, it is more complicated. If you check your log files, you may notice that sometimes a smaller number of visitors consume less data transfer and wise-versa. This is due to different ways of how your data transfer is consumed. Returning visitors may consume less data transfer, since they may have stored some files on their own computers needed to view your website from previous times they have visited your website. Generally your allocated data transfer is used on following protocols: HTML, STMP, FTP and POP

1. Data Transfer used on HTML protocol.
   HTML or Hypertext Markup Language is a an authoring software language used to write pages. But even if your pages are written using different scripting language like PHP, the output that an Internet browser receives is in HTML code. So when you access your log files the statistics shown for HTML data transfer generally reflects the visitors that have come to visit your website. This includes people who are browsing Internet as well as robots such as search engine crawlers that visit your site in order to index your pages.
2. Data Transfer used on STMP and POP3.
   STMP and POP3 stand for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and Post Office Protocol
   respectfully and are used to send and receive e-mails over the Internet. If you use your server to send and receive e-mails, this will use your allocate data transfer. Whenever you notice that small amount of visitors to our website resulted in greater consumption of data transfer, this may very well be to the fact your data transfer was used to send or receive e-mails.
3. Data Transfer used on FTP.
   FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is generally used whenever you upload files to your server. Whether they are HTML, images or other types of files.

How much Disc Space and Data transfer used for an average page?
Presuming that an average size of web page is about 135 KB following should be true: 1 GB of disc space will allow you about 5000 pages
1 GB of data transfer will allow you about 2500 visitors.

Volodymmyr Zablotskyy
Writer for
Web Hosting Review Blog