I want several POP3 email accounts, enough space for a five to ten page website, and FTP access so my friends can download party photos (333KB per photo) I would like to be able to use FrontPage as well.


Hmm, the pics are going to increase my space requirements...


Charles.

NOt sure how much photos you will put online.. + it depends if you'll use f.e. a ASP / PHP script to display them ...

depends on how many pics your uploading

good point.

What is the best way to make my pics avalible?
should I go with FTP or let people just copy the jpegs?
I guess I could zip them up for FTPing...

Thanks for your help.

You could zip them up though you wont achieve much compression over your jpg's. But it will ensure your visitors can download them. Or, if you want to display them as well put them into some stadard pages and your visitors can right click on them and save them. It depends what your primary purpose is...to provide the pics in an archive or to display them as well.

Regards

Gary

Thanks Gary.

I think I'll go home tonight and count up the size of all the .jpgs I want to display and multiply that by the number of friends I have.

a depressingly low number I'm sure...

Thanks to everyone for all of your help. I remain open to suggestions.

Charles

Display them as 15k thumbnails linked to the main image. That way, your friends/visitors get to to decide which images they want to see 333KB of (which they can still then go on to saving to their hdd).

Cheers

Gary

I was gonna make a suggestion like the one above.

Display thumbnails of the pic, they don't even have to be 15k then you can have it so they either click on the pic to get the full size or you can have a text link under the thumbnail that they can right click on to save the full size.

Depending on how you want to do it, you can even put the pics in packs. Like have thumbnails of pics 1-5 and then have one .zip download for them. If you want to give them more freedom of which picture to choose then you should have them as individual downloads.

One more thing I want to say is, if all you want is space to store photos and have a lot of email addresses. Why don't you get an email acount at a place like http://www.bigmailbox.com or http://www.everyone.net where it's free or really cheap and store your photos on yahoo. They give you 30mb free space. I don't really see the point in spending money on a website just to transfer photos, it's on you though

Basically, just start off with a basic hosting plan. Should you find yourself in the need for more space and data transfer, I am sure your host will allow an upgrade.

Hello,

I would agree with what Big-Mike and Gary suggested. Make yourself thumbnails of the pictures and them your visitors could select which image to see or not. This would not only significantly reduce the Bandwith as well as would result is less maintainence.

I would also recommend you to signup for a minimal hosting plan, such as having 1Gb Bandwith and 25mb space or so. With such a package you would be able to serve 3148 images of 333KB size each and you would be able to upload 75 images of 333KB size each.

You can always get some add-ons if you out-grow the plan :)
Best of luck selecting a right host and right plan :)


--Omair