Setting up a sales website

[rogertb]

Hi chaps, just for some fun I'm going to try and set up a website and attempt to sell a few pics ... this is as much to improve my site building knowledge as anything else - anyway - I can't get my head around where all the big original stills files are stored (forgive me if this is obvious). I can (and have) built sites with a few shots on as thumbnails which link to slightly bigger images (for clarity) but if I want the viewer to be able to download a hi-res version (and there could be hundreds, maybe even thousands eventually) of BIG files are these just uploaded to my hosting company ? ... that would be stretching their resources a bit ! Any advice welcome Regards Roger

[Bob Atkins]

Storage is cheap these days. If you assume a full size image is 10MB, you can store 100 images per GB. A 500GB drive will store 50000 images and you can buy such a drive for about $50. Storing 1000 images would cost the hosting company about $1 in hardware!

The hosting company I use (Hostmonster) provides "unlimited" storage space for $6.95/month. While I presume there actually is some limit, it's high enough not to need to worry about exceeding it with a personal website, even if it's a business site. They also provide e-commerce tools, lots and lots of scripts to help setting up a site including gallery scrips for images. I've found them to be very reliable and so far and their customer support is excellent.

So I don't think you need to worry about overloading your webshost's servers with too many images, as long as you're dealing with a decent hosting company.

[rogertb]

Thanks Bob - good of you to get back to me - my hosting company have said "...you have a maximum file download limit of 25GB per month." I take it they mean I am able to "upload" 25gb a month to their storage ... ! That should be OK (I must say I have have had no reason to complain about their service and support so would prefer not to change hosts).

Again, thanks so much for taking the time.

Roger

[Bob Atkins]

The download limit is probably your allowable download bandwidth. If someone views a 10MB file on your site, that's 10MB of download. If 100 people view that 10MB file, it's 1GB of download. If 250 people view ten 10MB images each, that's your 25GB of bandwidth used up.

This site hovers around 100GB/month of bandwidth usage. Hostmonster gives me "unlimited" bandwidth (whatever that means!). So far no problems.

You'd have to check with your host whether they count your uploads to the system as part of the allowable bandwidth usage.

[rogertb]

That helps clear up my confusion thanks Bob, I think I'll just go ahead and set it up and if my host starts getting concerned I'll change over to hostmonster.

Best Roger