Website Size

[mmltonge]

Hi, im not sure where this topic should go but this seemed the most relevant place

I run http://www.reading-festival.org.uk but find my site is not accessible too often, we recently got disgregarded from google because the server was down when google came a crawling. I was hoping you could tell me if my database contributes to the overall size of the website

I ask this because in looking for new hosts visitor bandwidth is an issue, with the current host i am promised unlimited bandwidth. Without the database the site is obviously quite small in size, but with them both (one for forums one for site content) it comes to about 3mb/4mb which would mean i will need to pay a lot of money for lots of bandwidth again. Please help a.s.a.p

Thanks
Mark

Edit: Moved to Database Talk by Brittany

[mikmik]

mmltonge, your Netblock owner comes up as Fasthosts, which I see has had many complaints before. Here is a forum I found by typing "Fasthosts into the search on Google: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&ie...asthosts&meta= , AND THIS IS THE FORUM: http://forums.freddyshouse.com/showthread.php?t=1786

Your server Is running Windows 2003,( http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/...estival.org.uk ) so I am not sure, there are several Fasthosts servers/hosts http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/hosted...13.171.223.255 Like 'www.imperialelephant.co.uk' and 'www.aptechsolutions.co.uk' to name but a few.

All the Fasthost owned 'resellers etc. that have their OS listed as "IIS 6.0" are Win 2003 servers.

I wanted to provide all the relevant information for you because this might be better in the 'eCommerce' section (I know, it is not very noticeable that hosting is covered there), and you could send a 'Private' Message to the moderator for that category by clicking the "private' button for 'cyanide'. He is good guy and great help.

To answer your question more specifically, it does not strike me as a big site, in fact your site including the MySQL database seems to be rather small. How many visitors a day do you get? And how much bandwidth do they use?

Your db is not a 'bandwidth' concern, it only holds the information for your webpages in a special way that is organized and 'served' in order to be dynamic with the visitors to your sites needs (sorry if I am sounding obvious, I don't know how much you know and want to cover all the bases. In fact, I didn't really understand this stuff for the longesr time!)
I just am sending a message to the moderator cyanide now to come have a look here!

eCommerce Talk
Ask questions about web hosting, merchant services and ecommerce issues. Topics include shopping carts, security, payment strategies, storefront partnerships, etc.
Moderator cyanide

Thanks, Minstrel!

[cyanide]

Thanks mikmik for the heads-up.

mmltonge
Yes database size will contribute to overall size of your site. 3-4mb is rather small, so I don't see an issue there.

Bandwidth vs. Diskspace
You mentioned bandwidth, but maybe you mean diskspace?

First of all, you should be wary about any host offering unlimited bandwidth / disk space.
Web hosts have long been using this as a marketing tactic. They know most sites won't use much MB, so unlimited sounds like you're getting a great deal.

You should also be wary of companies offering super cheap pricing also. In order for them to survive and be profitable, they will need to sacrifice in certain areas, such as support or even over-loading each server, to maximize profitability.

Please feel free to ask more questions and maybe some clarification, as I was a bit confused about disk space / bandwidth.

[mmltonge]

I did mean bandwidth, we get 50mb diskspace, but i was under the impression that if my site is 3/4mb everytime i get a hit it takes 3/4mb bandwidth. now we get about 800/900 hits a day and 100/200 unique hits a day. So in a month we get approximately 3000 uniques and this is set to rise hugely once the festival gets going and our shop gets it names about (along with once google gets us back on its bloody search engine) so im concerned that a company offering 1GB of bandwidth per month isnt enough, as 900 hits (each day) would be almost 3gb... where as 3000 uniques in the month comes to 9gb... most hosts which dont offer unlimited only offer 2gb per month at the price i can afford (we are non profit so can not really afford to pay much)

The company we go with is
www.streamlinenet.net
we find them reliable for most of the day but its not good enough as their are times in EACH day (without fail) where the site wont load. the FTP never goes down but for some reason the site doesnt load sometimes in every day

Do you know of any companies/sites that would pay to have a banner advertisement on the site for say £15 a month?

Thanks for your help so far

[ChrisRC]

Well, they aren't downloading the entire contents of your site, database or no, with every hit. Only the stuff that gets downloaded counts against your bandwidth.

From a glance, it looks like your homepage would count for about 101 kb of bandwidth on a first visit.

[mmltonge]

so the same size applies for return hits then?

Say we take the 101kb as a standard for our pages. we get 800/900 hits per day so times it by 800 we get roughly 80,000 kb which translates to... (any help here) i think 80mb... not sure if im right there or 800 mb. Either one its still a lot of bandwidth a month

[ChrisRC]

80 mb roughly.

After the first visit though, most users would be taking advantage of images and unchanged content cached on their hard drive rather than downloading everything again.

Do you have access to server logs or a bandwidth audit with your current host?

[cyanide]

Yes you're looking at about 10 pages per MB, but as Chris said it could be more. Best to keep an eye on your server stats / log files. And you'll get an idea after a couple weeks.

[mmltonge]

i can get into a folder called log files and then their is a folder in that called W3SVC1563923971 and inside that a load of log files ex040309 - 23 will these have the logs i need to check?

[ChrisRC]

That's it. Of course, from the sounds of things now you need to figure out how to read the logs huh?

I usually import mine into ms access and run reports and queries against them from there. There are however a number of free and commercial analysis programs out there. Most web hosts also provide some sort of analysis package too...

[mmltonge]

Well thanks alot for all your help. Ill keep an eye on server stats (when i find out how) and ill also email the server hosts to see if they can tell me how much bandwidth im using per month.

Thank you
Mark