Ecommerce Web Design Blog

A major factor in the package prices for hosting packages is often the amount of disk space and bandwidth you receive. How much is enough for your website needs?

How much capacity is enough for web hosting? This question we are asked very frequently. The answer to it depends on a number of things:

• What will you be doing with the website? A shopping cart website for example will need an allocation of physical hard drive space on our servers to hold the product images, descriptions and any downloadable files you have to accompany your description. If the product is virtual, you may need additional space for that as well. A static content 'HTML' website of 5-10 pages with some PDFs and images will require considerably less. Most small business websites rarely get above 100mb of disk space and many use considerably less disk space than this.
• How many visitors do you expect? This depends on two factors allocated to you by your hosting provider: disk space and bandwidth. Of these, it is bandwidth that reflects amount of downloading and uploading activity to your site - it is the amount of website data transferred to or from your site. This includes your activities managing your products and more significantly the visitors to your site. You can have a site with a small amount of diskspace but if it is extremely popular it might receive a massive amount of visitors and use up its bandwidth allocation. Bandwidth is often referred to as monthly web traffic. Most small business websites use less than 2000mb (2gigabytes) of monthly traffic, however high popularity sites like serious online traders can receive hundreds or thousands of visitors a month and quickly use up 10-15gb of traffic. Our top ecommerce package with Platinum Privileges provides an allocation of up to 20GB meaning even the busiest of websites will rarely need to worry about running out of their traffic allocation.
• For many small business websites, all of our starter packages (Bronze Hosting, Standard Web Design and Starter Ecommerce) offer 100mb of space and 2000mb (2gb) of traffic. In most cases this is sufficient. Customers can contact us to purchase additional space for any given month if they think they will run out (or if they do).

On top of disk space and bandwidth, find out from your web hosting provider how reliable their servers are. How often are the servers backed up? Do they have to be taken down for maintenance? What level of uptime guarantee can they provide you? Osc Works servers are backed up every day have a 99.9%+ uptime guarantee - plus high-performance specifications to ensure that pages are served quickly and efficiently even under heavy load.