Web space requirements

[alexcraw]

I'm not sure if this is the proper forum to post this, but I will go ahead anyway.

I am looking into building a web site for a friend who will sell furniture. This site will be updated regularly with pictures of items for sale and will have e-commerce capabilities. There should be the ability to contact the company and view stats of traffic. How will I know which hosting package to buy?

Can any body give a rough estimate of which type of site requires which amount of space. There are a number of starter packages available which range from 20Mb to 120Mb in web space.

How can I find out how much space a certain site takes up?

Cheers

Alex

[Variable]

I won't plug my employer here but there are many Internet companies that have e-commerce packages. If you have a lot of pictures simply put them in a folder and see how large the folder is by right clicking it and clicking properties. That should give you a basis to start. All companies will allow you to expand the size you currently have or I assume they will : )
Start with 100MB and go from there.

[jlreich]

I have an e commerce hosting plan that gives me 2GB space for $9.99 a month, and I use less than 10MB. :p That includes my storefront and all.

Unless you have hundreds of products you most likely won't need much space. Yeah do like variable said and put the pics in a folder, see what size it is. Pictures are what takes up space. The markup for an actual webpage usually amounts to just KB.

[alexcraw]

Thanks guys. That's certainly given me a few ideas as to the initial package to go for. I think the 100Mb site will do to begin and as the product range increases, so to might the site size. The website will not be the main selling location to the business, but as the business grows, he hopes to be selling everything online, eliminating the need for display premises.

Cheers Guys

Alex

[Variable]

For a "real" businesses online, that make a profit, I would ask what kind of hardware the hosting company uses. Many companies are using SATA and IDE drives on white boxes and offerring very cheap plans. If the business is critical I would ask them about the hardware and downtime should a drive fail; newer servers and SCSI RAID arrays are very expensive.

[juniper]

Do they really use SATA and IDE on production servers? I would have just figured they would have SCSI, for 3000.00 you can get a descent compaq server with RAID 5 SCSI. The person before me here was a IDE / SATA nut, (he used RAID 0 alot also if that tells ya anything) I replaced 5 SATA drives in one server in less then 6 months. (its been stable for past 6 months now though) I see the flashing RAID array deminished popup in my sleep now hehe.

[Variable]

It's very common. Average consumer who wants a web site think they need lots of space for their site. I think our average web site is under 5 MB. The cheap web hosting sites offer a lot of space because the space is cheap (sata or IDE) and is likely on a a linux running on whitebox not a rack mounted server.. Anyone who owns an expensive datacenter dislikes whiteboxes because they are an inefficient waste of space and the MTBF is MUCH higher for all the parts.. There is a market for them though. We offer them now.

You can get a new compaq for 3 grand without drives maybe. Five 146gb UW SCSI drives are going to run that much.

[juniper]

Proliant ML380 is $2295.00
3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Processor

• 1 GB RAM

• SCSI Hot-Swap

• CD-ROM

• 10/100/1000 Ethernet

• RAID controller

5U Rack



and the hot swap 146GB SCSI drives are $509.00 each. need 3 fror RAID 5 so roughly 3800.00 +tax tottal (just built one hehe )

Im shopping for a SAN ATM and ran accross this little tid bit..

"SATA has a mean time before failure of 500,000 power on hours and should be used only 8 hours in a day, whereas the HP SCSI drives have a mean time before failure at 1.5 million power on hours and can be used 7 x 24x 365 days."

[pangea33]

SATA has a mean time before failure of 500,000 power on hours and should be used only 8 hours in a day...
Is this for real, or do they mean 8 hours a day of demanding use, like in a server capacity? My computer runs all the time.

[Paul Komski]

For the best uptimes for commercial sites use a webhost that has muti-server clusters such as http://www.netfirms.com/company
Our entire network is built on a multi-server, clustered hosting platform which distributes the task of serving your website over hundreds of servers. This translates into super fast access time, instant site availability, and near 100% uptime.

[jlreich]

Yes Netfirms is who I use. ;) Great packages. I haven't ever had any down time that I know of. And yes my business is small.

[Variable]

Interesting site, I think what they are doing is Linux based virtual servers using both SATA SANS and SCSI RAID 5 for critical data. Their support isn't that knowledgeable about back end hardware but that's not too surprising. We have a SATA storage array for backups and it performs fine but it is underused and I think that is the key. One of the benefits of these big cheap arrays can be that they don't always have to function at full load and can last longer this way.

I was at a conference last year and the neat idea was compaq blade servers running multi core AMD's blades over gig SATA SANS and using virtual servers; with virtual servers they can be rebuilt super fast or even built automatically as needed. You are basically building a huge scalable beast of I/O (can you say supercomputer) and then create virtual OS's within it. The problem with doing it in Windows is the cost of Licensing.This Company is getting around the licensing problems by using open source software. They are doing exactly what I thought would happen. After coming back from this conference and talking to people at work who shot the idea down because Windows is 90% of the market. The only problem with these ideas is RAM. Linux is RAM cheap so that's a plus. Each virtual requires its own RAM. There is no technology that I know of right now that allows the massive technology jump that multi core CPU’s and gigabit SATA SANs give to their "piece" of the I/O beast. By the way, in the conference they were talking about 4, 8 and 16 core CPU sockets. All we see now are duals.

Anyway, this company is maximizing available technology and keeping away from MS for the OS for now... ;)

[juniper]

Is this for real, or do they mean 8 hours a day of demanding use, like in a server capacity? My computer runs all the time.

posted in Q&A on HP web site under SAN solutions here is the link..

http://h18002.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/msa1000smb/qa.html


also here..

"SATA drives are designed for archive-class duties and should not be used in high I/O 24/7 situations"

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/msa1500cs/qa.html

I think Im going with MSA1000 cluster with 2 G4's and 5x 300GB SCSI + 4 free 146GB scsi deal