| General rule of thumb is not to sign up for yearly web | | | | transfer per month. Larger, commercial or popular |
| hosting plans. Instead, get monthly plan where you can | | | | websites often consume more than 5GB of monthly |
| unsubscribe from on the second month when you are | | | | data transfer and sometimes, exceeding 100GB of |
| not happy with the service. That is, if you ended up | | | | monthly data transfer. |
| with an unreliable web hosting company in the first | | | | Before you decide on a web hosting plan, be sure to |
| place. | | | | check this: |
| Here is a simple guide that can be easily applied to | | | | - What is the monthly data transfer/ bandwidth |
| typical web sites: | | | | allowed? |
| --Web Space-- | | | | - Will you be charged if your website exceeds its limit? |
| Expect a small website to take up 10 and 100 MB. | | | | - Are you able to upgrade/add on your bandwidth? |
| Considering that you may want to expand your | | | | --Connection Speed-- |
| website in the near future, it is advisable to get a web | | | | Visitors to your web site will often connect via 56K |
| hosting plan with ample web space. | | | | modems or ADSL modems but your web host |
| Make sure that you know your needs before you | | | | provider should have a much faster connection. Your |
| start looking for your web host. Not every web hosting | | | | website should have high web site connections that |
| plan can be upgraded or customised. More than often, | | | | are approximately 1000 high speed (56 Kilobytes per |
| webmasters do not get the features they need and | | | | second) modems combined- T3 fiber optic |
| are not able to customise their web hosting features. | | | | connections. |
| --Monthly Traffic-- | | | | In the early days of the Internet, T1- connections was |
| Data transfer per month are typically referred to as | | | | considered a fast connection. The fastest connections |
| bandwidth. It is the amount of data transfer that occurs | | | | available are T3 connections that are used by Internet |
| between your website and visitors. A small or medium | | | | Service Providers and major corps. |
| web site will consume between 1 and 5GB of data | | | | |