Hi, I'm new here...and I'm not exactly sure if it goes here or not, but here goes:

I'm looking for a host for my domain, which will have a webcomic on it in the forseeable future, as well as my own personal site. For the personal site, I'm not expecting a lot of visitors at all, but I have no idea what to expect for a webcomic that will post not daily or weekly, but possibly a chapter every 2-3 weeks, and as such, have no idea what bandwidth or space (and consequently, money) I would need to pay. There wouldn't be any need for anything fancy, though - nothing like CGI (although preferable), PSP, mySQL, etc.

It would, of course, need to be fairly affordable (perhaps $50-60 a year or lower).

Does such an offer even exist? Where could I find such an offer?

Sorry for all the questions and thank you!

Hi,

As for space, this would actually be a simple computation. If you have a draft or copy of the comic image that you want to post, you could always find out how large it is in terms of kb or megabytes. For the web, stick to either JPEG, GIF or PNG images. JPEG being the smallest in size but not always the best results. PNG is the best but may be larger in size but it all depends on the number of colors and so on. What you could do is design one or two chapters of the comics on your own computer, save it in all three image formats; jpeg, gif and png and compare the image size and results.

I would say that it would be best to keep each page to about 100kb or really not more than 200kb per image. The larger means more bandwidth consumption and slower for those without the high bandwidth internet connections.

Then decide how many weeks of archive of your comics you want to store online. If it is going to be like 200kb per comic strip on a forthnight interval and you intend to keep 5 years worth then you would get something like :-

200kb x 28 chapters (one every forthnight) = 5.6mb of space per year or 28mb for 5 years collection.

But you probably want to add other things like some html pages and so on and web traffic log files and emails would take up some space too. So look for something within the 20mb to 50mb region.

As for bandwidth, it would depend on how big your pages are and how many visitors you expect to view your pages. This is a difficult what to decide.

Personally, I would usually take a very conservative estimate of 20 x the total web space needed. But this might not apply here since it works well for larger web sites.

In your case, you could do fine with about 2 to 5gb/mth.

So in short, you should be able to do well with :-

Web space : 20 to 50mb
Bandwidth : 2 to 5gb/mth
Make sure the web host gives you the option to upgrade to a new plan if you so need to do so.

Yes, what you are asking for might be workable. If you want quotes for this, do post your requirements at the 'Web Hosting Request' forum.

And the 'PSP' should be 'PHP'. ;)

Most hosts "basic" plan would probably be fine for you and come to no more than your $50-60 budget. Try posting in the requests forum, goodluck.