My clients (OK, my mom and sis) asked me to design a website for them that will focus primarily on pictures of animals and and a few pages of text.

They said at any given time the most amount of images they will have on the site will be around 500-600 total (most of the galleries of photos will be private) probably about 100 accessible to the public (I don't think this makes much difference though).

Also, the site is more regional based, for their local business throughout the county, so traffic probably won't be *that high*.

So I was wondering what number I should be looking at when choosing a host for them (they asked me to do that too). How much bandwidth, space would be ideal for their type of site?

500-600 total

Assuming a fairly high resolution, 3MB of disk space each. 2GB of space will probably suffice.

An account with 2GB of space will probably come with at least 20GB of data transfer, and unless you've got some really patient/interested folks visiting the site, you won't be using more than that. This is only guesswork though, you never know until you actually put the site online.

Not even that much

He have sites with about 500 - 600 MP3 files that use transfer less than 10GB/mo.
and total disk space of about 2GB

so, 500 pics won't be any problems to host



fastreplies

In my experience sites like this tend to easily surpass the initial usage estimates.

However, that doesn't mean that you should look for the biggest hosting plan that you can find (that would be expensive!) - but my advice would be to make sure you check out the upgrade path so that you know what would be involved in any potential upgrade (e.g. any downtime? approximate increase in cost?).

I agree with the previous two posts suggesting that 2GB is probably a good starting point for disk space.

2 GB is not little and it must be enough for you.

If most of the images will be private, behind passwords, the usage won't be that much. Have a look at my site. It's hosted on a $7 a month Bluehost shared server.

Use jpegs, and balance them between quality and size. If you use Photoshop's 'Save For Web' feature, around 70 % quality usually needs a microscope to tell apart from 100 %, but it's less than half the file size.

If they're wildlife images, they probably have out of focus backgrounds, which come out to much smaller jpegs. This is about howmuch transfer you use, not about how much space you have available to host the images. That's not a problem at all...

Thanks for all the hosting advice everyone

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

If most of the images will be private, behind passwords, the usage won't be that much. Have a look at my site. It's hosted on a $7 a month Bluehost shared server.

Yes, they will be mostly private. Even though they're on the same server, do private, protected ones take up less space, transfer than public ones?

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

Use jpegs, and balance them between quality and size. If you use Photoshop's 'Save For Web' feature, around 70 % quality usually needs a microscope to tell apart from 100 %, but it's less than half the file size.

If they're wildlife images, they probably have out of focus backgrounds, which come out to much smaller jpegs. This is about howmuch transfer you use, not about how much space you have available to host the images. That's not a problem at all...

I’ll give them those tips

They're planning on starting a pet photography business, so they'll be a combination of indoor-outdoor, not quite sure what the ratios will be. Are you also saying the amount of space doesn’t make as much of a difference, I should only be concerned with how much transfer the host provides?

Even though they're on the same server, do private, protected ones take up less space, transfer than public ones?

The space usage will be the same, it's just that the more hops the visitor has to jump in order to get access, the fewer visitors will find it worthwhile to get that access, and thus the net data transfer usage will be reduced.