Necessity v Capacity

A small or medium website consumes a minimum of 10 MB and might require around 100 MB of disk space. It may be so that the HTML page itself, is pretty small. Maybe less than even one KB, but the size of the images used – the buttons, banners, gif and jpeg files are usually large. Sometimes they are so large that they are more than the size of the page itself. It can be easily expected that each HTML page would take at the least 5 KB and up to around 50 KB of disk space on the web server, of course, varying in proportion to the use of images and other space consuming entities If you are going to be using loads of images and graphic elements (we haven’t even started on sound files and movies). The amount of disk space needed immediately escalates. One needs to be sure of ones needs before setting out to hunt for a suitable Web Host.

A small or medium sized web site is bound to consume approximately 1 GB to 5GB of data transfer per month.

You can calculate this by multiplying your average page size with the number of expected page views per month. If your average page size is 30KB and you expect 50,000 page views per month, you will need 0.03MB x 50,000 = 1.5GB.

Bigger, commercial sites often tend to guzzle more than 100GB of monthly traffic.

Possible restrictions that could be placed on monthly transfer, possibilities of the site being closed in case the volume is exceeded, whether you might be billed extra if the volume is exceeded, whether the future need for expansion of the site itself is bound to be covered and whether upgrading would be a simple task – these are basic aspects to look out for before signing a contract with the host provider

It is but plausible that the vistors to your website will more than often connect via a modem but then, your host provider must be possessing a connection that is faster.

In the early days of the Internet a T1 connection was considered a fast connection. Today connection speeds are much faster.

1 byte equals to 8 bits (and that's the number of bits used to transport one character). Low speed communication modems can transport from about 14 000 to 56 000 bits per second (14 to 56 kilobytes per second). That is somewhere between 2000 and 7000 characters per second, or about 1 to 5 pages of written text.

One kilobit (Kb) is 1024 bits. One megabit (Mb) is 1024 kilobits. One gigabit (Gb) is 1024 megabits. 
 

The connection speeds ascribed to on the Internet today are tabulated below

Before engaging yourself in any sort of a contract with the hosting provider, it would be wise to surf some other websites on the particular host’s server and attempt to test their network speed. Also, you could compare the site to the site you shall be needing, to see if it looks like your needs are the same. If possible, contacting a few of their customers and getting their feedback would be helpful in persuading you to make up your mind for or against it.