
Reader Favorites
Next comes the slightly trickier part. You'll need to take your average expected page download size and multiply that by the number of expected page views in a month. This is a difficult figure to pin down accurately. Any time you embark on a new web project, you will have plans, expectations and goals, but reality will often differ from those. This is especially true for webmasters with less experience. If you are an experienced webmaster, you should be able to come up with a reasonable traffic estimate. Again, you want to give yourself some headroom if you come anywhere close to the limit of the package you're interested in. But there are pretty good odds that you won't come anywhere near the limit if you're tackling your first project. If you're not sure, don't worry about it too much.
If you are a less experienced webmaster, then I suggest that one important consideration is to find a host that will make it easy for you upgrade your package. Once you determine what basic features you will need, MySQL, e-mail, etc... the bandwidth associated with that package will likely be sufficient to get you started. But if your website takes off and starts pulling more traffic than you expected, you want to make sure you're with a host that has reasonable fees for going over your monthly limits and will allow you to move up to a bigger hosting package seamlessly. Most companies will have no problem with you upgrading a package, just double check before you sign up.