Calculating Storage Requirements For Your Web Site

By Author: Elad Domb
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Even in this day of unlimited hosting plans, there remain plenty of good reasons why you should be calculating storage requirements for your Web site. In the first instance, there are some very low-cost plans (and some free ones) that keep your hosting specifications low, sometimes just a few gigabytes (GB). If you are using a free hosting area from your ISP, you will also have limited storage. Of course, others may read this article wondering why they should both calculating storage requirements with their unlimited plans. The answer for them is that failing to control your digital media will lead to excess, excess will lead to impacts on performance and all of this translates into lost time and money.

That said, digital information is a source of true empowerment, and the value of it is mission-critical to many firms. Since you will also have to store your Web site locally, and have backups as well, you do face economic pressures to keep the totals reasonable. Unlimited hosting plans do nothing to attenuate the need for onsite storage of the Web assets, and letting them grow out of control is not good business. Consider ...
... it something like capacity planning that businesses do, even if you have a simple family photo-sharing site. Come to think of it, with the proliferation of consumer-level digital cameras with 8- and 12-megapixel resolution, and the habit of some people to upload high- instead of low-resolution images, make that especially if you have a photo-sharing site!

Basic steps to storage calculations

First, collect your data. You need to have it centrally located, in your local drive, before anything else will work. You can also keep track of what is there by using various software tools, even a simple spreadsheet program if that is all you have. This might be laborious if you have RAID arrays full of content, or use a dozen different hosts, but you have to start somewhere. You need to know what the total size is of all the components. HTML pages are small, of course, but you may be surprised at how quickly even compressed Internet-friendly media formats can add up (mp3 files, Flash, jpeg images, etc.).

On every major operating system, from Windows and Macintosh OS X to the various flavors of Linux, there are simple ways to check the size of single files or folders full of them. You should start by calculating these sizes, but remember that it is only a start. Along the way, you will add new content, delete old files, build up an e-mail or chat backlog, and so on. You need to look ahead as best you can into the future and estimate what the effects of these changes will be over time. Then, as you do move forward, you need to check the reality of your site profile changes against what you had planned. This is really the only way to ensure that you do not waste money on too much storage or, more likely, not have enough.

Stakeholder meetings
If you are the business owner or IT manager, it is probably your responsibility to stay on top of the storage needs, local and remote. With the cost of hard drives falling into a black hole (1TB bare drives are under $50) there should be no obstacle to getting all the local storage you need, assuming you are not going to start up another Google. You need to meet with IT staff, designers, marketing people and any other stakeholder in the site to gauge changes and review options. As an ongoing process, this will work much better than as a once-in-a-while chore, and everyone with an interest in the success of the site should understand that even these mundane considerations are really, under the surface (literally), quite important.

It would not hurt to set goals even as you are calculating future usage. With the price of hosting also going down, requiring your occasional renegotiation of plan costs with the host firm, having goals for the growth and management of digital assets is going to help everyone involved. You need to decide when and how much storage to buy for local needs, make a plan for reducing storage costs by a certain amount (15%) annually and factor these items into the calculation for hosting (which, as already mentioned, is also subject to price reduction). Having goals, as well as contingency plans, is the best way to keep your site storage needs, and your local backups, running smoothly and operating with sufficient grow space.

At a Fortune 500 level, they call it storage capacity planning, and it has heretofore related primarily to non-Internet assets. However, today the trend is going to the so-called cloud, or remote storage, so understanding all of the ins and outs is critical to your ability to contain cost and maintain stability. Storage budgets likely will not increase at the same rate as the need for the storage, so better resource management is not optional. Taking a few practical steps as indicated here will help you mature into a good capacity planner, Internet-wise and otherwise.
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