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Tech in Plain English: Hosting Part 2

Tech in Plain English

Introduction

Last week, we drew comparisons between finding a house and searching for web hosting.   By the end of last Tuesday’s post we had moved all our furniture into our suitably sized house i.e. we had found web hosting that provided enough server space to store the content of our website.  This week, our second installment of Tech in Plain English will rely on the same ‘house’ analogy to explain bandwidth in relation to web hosting.

A very popular house

As was the case last week where we relied on a number of assumptions, this week is no different, we shall assume that once you have moved into your house you intend to have an open door policy.  You will invite your neigbours, your neighbours’ neighbours and their friends.  You will post your address on every lamppost and you will tell everyone you meet to tell everyone they meet about your new home.  It may sound like a wild idea but when you get your website online this is exactly what you are doing (unless of course it is a private website).  You want people to visit your site and hopefully from there they can find a product or service that meets their needs.

To make the visit to your house simple, you have installed a driveway.  The only way in to your house is via this driveway so you will need to make sure that your driveway is long and wide enough to handle the flow of traffic to and from your house.  If you don’t do this your visitors will either spend most of their time queuing or, even worse, they will simply turn around and find another house to visit.

This is what bandwidth is. It is the driveway to your site.  It controls the flow of traffic to and from your site (site visitors) and enables your visitors to access its contents.

How big is your drive-way?

Most hosting providers measure the flow of traffic on a monthly basis but, instead of counting people or cars, hosting providers will count the amount of data accessed from your site.  When looking for web hosting you will have to determine how popular you think your site is going to be i.e. how frequently people will visit it and how much data will be accessed in a given month.

There is no specific formula to determine exactly how large or small to make your monthly bandwidth (data) allowance and it is very difficult to predict how popular how site will be.  However, returning to our house analogy, if you have a small studio apartment there is a limit to how many people you can accommodate so you driveway should reflect this.   Conversely if you have a six-bedroom mansion then perhaps you will need a large multi lane driveway.  This is one reason why you may notice that larger web hosting space often comes with increased monthly bandwidth allowance (compare Hatua’s Silver and Gold packages for example).

Some simple maths

Most hosting providers will quantify the monthly bandwidth (data) allowance in Gigabytes (GB) while an average page on a website is approximately 320 Kilobytes (KB).  Hopefully the calculations below will help you determine how much bandwidth you might need.

Let us assume that your website consists of 5 pages, so this means your entire site is 1600 KB (320 KB x 5).  There are approximately 1000 KB in one Megabyte (MB).  Therefore your site requires roughly 1.5 MB

Each time a visitor views a page on your site they are transferring 320 KB of data and if they view all five pages they will transfer 1.5 MB of data in total.

When calculating bandwidth, it is not the number of unique visitors that counts but the number of times a page is accessed.

So if the same person accesses the entire site 10 times in the same month the bandwidth used will be 15 MB (1.5 MB x 10).

If 100 people access every page on the site 10 times in one month then the total bandwidth used will be 1500 MB (15 MB x 10).  1500MB is approximately 1.5 GB (Gigabytes).

One last thing about bandwidth

The monthly bandwidth allowance includes all the data that travels through your hosting package.  This includes data accessed by people visiting your site as well as any data you upload to the site.  So if for instance you add a new page you will then potentially be uploading a further 320KB of data and that will affect your monthly bandwidth allowance accordingly.

Finally…

Hopefully this has been a simple but useful guide on defining your hosting requirements.  The key things to remember are:

  • How much space you need to store your information,
  • How many times your information is accessed and how many times you will be uploading more data.

That way you can decide how many MB of storage you need and how many GB per month of data allowance is realistic.

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If you have any questions about this topic or Hatua’s hosting packages or if you wish to suggest a topic for future Tech in Plain English posts please leave a comment below.
This post is part of Hatua’s Tech in Plain English (TiPE) series. TiPe’s  aim is to translate geek speak into simple english so that our service users can make informed decisions about their ICT needs.

 

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→ May 28, 2012
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Tech in Plain English: Hosting – Part 1

 

Nearly every time I speak to someone who wants a website designed by Hatua the conversation goes like this

Client:             I would like a website for my organisation

Me:                  Great.  Do you need hosting space too?

Client:             What is that?

I then spend the next few minutes explaining hosting and hope that by the end of it I haven’t confused the person.

Seeing as the topic of hosting crops up very early in the website design discussion, we decided to make it the subject of Hatua’s first Tech in Plain English series.

So, what is hosting?

The best way to explain hosting is to use an analogy.

Imagine for a minute that the website you want designed is represented by furniture.  It can be any type of furniture, but for now I am going to go with household furniture.  You have a bed, a wardrobe, a dining table, some sofas and maybe even an armchair.  All this furniture is spread out in an open field.  Just lying there.  You will need somewhere to put this furniture because an open field is no place for it.   As it is household furniture, it is fair to assume that you will need a house.   This essentially is what hosting is.  It is a house for your website.

Let us assume you decide to rent a house.  You will need to find a landlord, pay some money and sign a contract before you can claim occupancy and move your furniture in.   The process is the same for hosting.  You will need to find a hosting provider, who will provide you with space on their computers (called servers) so that you can store (host) your website and eventually make it available online.  This hosting service is often for a fixed period of time, usually a year, and like the rental market the prices can vary significantly between hosting packages.

Like houses, hosting comes in many forms and the process involved in choosing a house is not too different to that of choosing suitable hosting.  For instance, if you have a large family and lots of furniture, you will probably be looking for a house with 3 or 4 bedrooms.  Likewise if you are planning on having a website with a lot of content you will need large amount of hosting.  Whereas the number of rooms or the size of each room will determine house size, the size of hosting is measured in megabytes, often abbreviated as MB.  The greater the number the more hosting space you have available.

Text based websites require very little hosting space.  Pictures, if not resized can take up quite a lot of hosting space.  Most small organisations with a site containing four or five text, a picture heavy front page and a blog can probably get by on the Hatua’s Silver hosting package (our smallest hosting package which provides you with 150MB of space).    The NLSE website that we designed is hosted on our silver package, and should give you an idea of what 150MB looks like.

If in doubt about how much hosting space you need, I would recommend starting with the smallest package available and if more space is needed upgrade the hosting package as necessary.  That way you don’t pay more than you have to. Alternatively, if you already have a web site that is hosted by someone else and you are thinking of moving it to a new hosting provider, find out how much space your current site uses and find a similar package.  Do be aware that your current site may not be using all of the available hosting space.  If you don’t know how to find out the amount of space your site is taking up, ask your hosting provider to tell you.   They should give you a figure in megabytes.

Now, anyone who has rented or owned a property will know that that size of the property is not the only thing that matters.  Cost of utilities, council tax and location are just a few factors that you may have to take into account.  This is also true of hosting.  Determining the size is just one aspect.   Next Tuesday we will focus on bandwidth but hopefully this week we have left you with a slightly better understanding of hosting.

If you have any questions about this topic or Hatua’s hosting packages or if you wish to suggest a topic for future Tech in Plain English posts please leave a comment below.

This post is part of Hatua’s Tech in Plain English (TiPE) series. TiPe’s  aim is to translate geek speak into simple english so that our service users can make informed decisions about their ICT needs.
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