I'm shopping around for a web host, and I was calculating with the price calculator at Brevig's website. But it occured to me- I have no idea how many MB of bandwidth I would need. It's going to be a personal site, but with wide-range appeal (wallpapers), so I really have no idea what a good, safe number would be. Any suggestions?

Sometimes its impossible to tell. You can guess the number of visitors you will have a month and multiply that times the size of your homepage including images.....then double it....but again thats just a guess.

Your best bet is to find a host that you trust and most importantly has a policy that will allow you to upgrade to a bigger account rather than paying overage fees. Most overage fees are somewhere in the neighborhood of $2-6/Gig.

Thats my advice.

I can feel people glaring at me already (no, I didn't pay attention in 8th grade computer class), but how many MB in a Gig?

statistically 1024. But some people just calculate it at 1000

Hard to say without knowing how big your wallpapers are and how popular they will be. However, I did play with the brevig.com calculator on their site, and their prices were relatively expensive compared to many of the hosts on this forum that oversell both space and bandwidth.

I'd suggest picking a host that has a generous but realistic allocation of resources... Probably a 200 megs storage with 6 gigs transfer is plenty to start with, at least until your popularity shoots through the ceiling.

From experience looking at our own customers, I doubt you'd need more than 5 GB, and wouldn't expect your site to use more than 1 GB at first. Also remember that if you need more in the future, you can always start out with a small package but upgrade to a bigger one later (no use forking out lots of money for a large plan to start out with).

Keeping in mind what dandanfirema said. Chose a host that you would prefer and then ask them in a e-mail, Can I upgrade to avoid over usage charges. If they say no, then move on. Wallpapers usually are high in size, about 100kb or more?:confused: So that could ad up. But, pick a plan with 2-5 gigs, and upgrade as needed.

Originally posted by Chris 24Host
Keeping in mind what dandanfirema said. Chose a host that you would prefer and then ask them in a e-mail, Can I upgrade to avoid over usage charges. If they say no, then move on. Wallpapers usually are high in size, about 100kb or more?:confused: So that could ad up. But, pick a plan with 2-5 gigs, and upgrade as needed.

Let's say the wallpapers are 250k in size each. That would still allow over 4000 downloads per gigabyte of traffic.

Originally posted by Chris 24Host
Keeping in mind what dandanfirema said. Chose a host that you would prefer and then ask them in a e-mail, Can I upgrade to avoid over usage charges. If they say no, then move on. Wallpapers usually are high in size, about 100kb or more?:confused: So that could ad up. But, pick a plan with 2-5 gigs, and upgrade as needed.

Let's say the wallpapers are 250k in size each. That would still allow over 4000 downloads per gigabyte of traffic.