This is my first post and I am extremely new to building websites. I am planning on building a commercial website and hope to attract many visitors. My question is this: If I start out hosting my site on shared server and find that my site is becoming too much of a drain on me financially by going over the bandwidth limit, can I transfer my site to a dedicated server?

Thanks in advance for your help!!

Yes you can.


What i would do in your case is find an account on a shared server that gives you 10-15 Gigs per month or more. DO NOT choose an "unlimited bandwidth" account, you will regret it.


I think it will take you quite a while to go over 10-15 Gigs, that's quite a bit.


And to make a transition even easier, choose a host that has shared servers and dedicated servers, then if you go over your bandwidth limit, the host can easily change you from one server to another.


And another idea would be to choose a host that sells extra bandwidth for about $5/Gig, that's a pretty good price, then if you go over the limit, you won't go broke.


Good luck :)

Thanks for the help. I've recently been informed about the whole "unlimited bandwidth scam". I guess my Mom was right: If it sounds too good to be true it usually is.

Kid,

The problems you are likely to run into as the traffic to your site grows are more than an increase in costs. Eventually, you would likely hit a point where "excessive" cpu usage could cause your account to be disabled. When you use more than a certain amount of cpu cycles, to the point where it is a detriment to other accounts on the same shared server, many hosts will disable your account. What they call abusing resources may be nothing more than sudden unexpected growth in popularity of your site.

Some hosts have shared servers where you have more resources available to you because the amount of accounts sharing that server is much more limited than the hundreds on a typical shared server.

If you should get to the point where you exceed that, then a dedicated server is what you will need.

Don't expect to save money as you grow, though. Each of these measures is more expensive than a basic shared server account. However, they do offer the advantage of allowing your account to remain active, along with some performance gains with each upgrade.

However, since you are planning a commercial website, your income should increase as well, so it should enable you to afford each upgrade.

[This message has been edited by Duster (edited 07-15-2000).]

How many hits is 10-15G for a 30k page?

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Adam "fibroptikl" Lysne
adam@motion5.com
Questions?
fibroptikl
73218345

Originally posted by fibroptikl:
How many hits is 10-15G for a 30k page?


here are the mathematical facts:

1 GB = 1024 MB

and

1 MB = 1024 KB

now, since you are converting GB to KB, let us first start calculating by finding out how many KB equal 1 GB.

1 GB = 1024 MB

similarly,

1024 MB = 1024 KB X 1024 KB = 1048576 KB

thus, by the above equation, we now know that 1 GB = 1048576 KB

therefore,

10 GB = 1048576 KB X 10 = 10485760 KB

and

15 GB = 1048576 KB X 15 = 15728640 KB

if a page on your website is 30 KB in size, then simply divide to find out the number of page views for bandwidth consumed in GB.

hence,

10 GB / 30 KB = 10485760 KB / 30 KB = 349525 hits.

and

15 GB / 30 KB = 15728640 KB / 30 KB = 524288 hits.

hope these equations help !!!

though these calculations are quite simple really, i'd suggest saving or printing this post for those who hate maths !!! ... so that they can use it in future for calculating hits vs. bandwidth consumed for pages on their personal websites.

Learner

[This message has been edited by Learner (edited 07-15-2000).]

Note that this equations in Learners (excellent) post do not include any images you may use on your 30k page. If you do have any images, add the size of the image(s) to 30k and divide by that new number.

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Chuck Fox
http://cfoxhost.com

Thanks Chuck, for pointing this important factor which i forgot to mention !

To expand further on what Chuck correctly pointed out...

another fact:

the file size of an HTML page does not include the sizes of images the embedded HTML code will download.

in other words, if the actual file size of a HTML page is 30 KB, and this HTML code includes "x" number of images... you would obviously have to add the sum total of the file sizes of all these images.

therefore, the equation to calculate the correct bandwidth consumed by a HTML page with images included would be:

File Size of HTML page + Sum Total of all the File Sizes of all the images (which are included in the code of the same HTML page) = Total Bandwidth consumed by this HTML page

Learner


[This message has been edited by Learner (edited 07-16-2000).]