by: Subhendu Sen

"2GB web space with 50GB traffic for $5.95 per month!"

A luring ad—definitely. In fact this ad makes many small business owners feel cheated by their present web hosts.

This is how the small business owners, who have taken small amount of space (say, 5, 10 or 25mb) calculate and feel that they are paying more :

"If 2000MB (2GB) costs $5.95 per month, then 5MB should cost (5.95 x 5 / 2000) = $0.15 only! But my web host charges me $1! A 700% profit!! Oh...I am losing so much money!!"

So, if a small business site shifts to the advertised web host, he should get better value for his money. Right?

Wrong.

Let me explain how :

As a small business owner, how many HTML pages do you have in your web site? 5, 10, 15, 25?

Experts say that you should not have a page of more than 100K including images. Normally the file size of a starndard HTML page is around 10-15K.

Remember that, many of the images linked to your pages are common. If you have a 400x300 pixel image, the file size of that image should not be more than 30K. Buttons are normally between 3-5K.

So, let's take an example of 25 page web site, which has (a) 25 HTML pages, (b) each page has one big image of 400x300 pixel and (c) have 25 buttons.

So, the total space usage is :

25 HTMLs x 15K = 375K

25 400x300 pixel images x 30K = 750K

25 buttons x 5K = 125K

Total : 1250K = 1.25MB

You need space for mail. How many email accounts do you need? 5, 10, 25? How much space you want to allocate for each mail box? Do you get large attachments? Your can set your email software to delete mails from the server (immediately or after few days) after you download them to your computer. So, if you check your mails every hour and keep your mail space clean for receiving further mails, you may safely allocate 1mb for each email accounts. If you are using only one email account, you can use the entire free space for your email.

So, with the above example, if you go for a 5MB space, it's enough for you in the given circumstances.

But, if you go for a 2GB space and use only 5MB of it, you are actually paying $5.99 for using 5MB space. A loss of $4.99 every month—$59.88 every year!

You got it now, right?

You may ask, 'What about Traffic? 50GB!! It's huge man!'

Yes, it's huge. But, do you need it?

With the above example, if one person visits all the pages, your site generates 1.25MB traffic. If you get say 100 such visitors every day, you generate only 3750MB or 3.5GB (approx) traffic for the entire month!

So, here again you pay more for the unused traffic.

Check from your control panel, how much space and traffic you are you consuming currently. Are you paying for unused space / traffic? If yes, then browse the web for reliable hosts and find out a plan which fits with your requiremnts. Compare the prices and features. Check the reliability of the host and go for the one you find the best.

And, Save Money!