Advice regarding my requirements...

[Fuzquia]

I am trying to launch an on-line gallery of some of my work. I am a Graphic Artist.

Although I have found some of the sticky tuts on this forum fantastic advice I am still a little confused with the following and wondered if anyone could help me clear them up.

How do I work out what my bandwidth requirements will be for my site?

Also I plan to have a contact page and perhaps a pdf download of a brochure from my site aswell as taking payments via a paypal business account. Does this require any of the php or asp type enabled hosting packages? I only say php and asp as I have seen these listed on the hosts packages offered! To be honest I am unsure of what these scripting languages involve and don't know if the likes of my contact page/payments/pdf download etc will use these languages. Therefore how do I know what I need in a hosting package?

I would appreciate any advice as I really don't want to upload my site and find nothing actually works on it!!

Thanks in advance to anyone who offers advice.

[monaghan]

Bandwidth is simple to calculate

Estimate how many pages of your site you expect an average visitor to look at, total the size of the HTML, CSS and image files. (remembering that browser caching should reduce the need to download common images across page loads)

Multiply this by the number of visitors you expect to get in a month

Estimate how many emails you expect to send / receive in a month

Estimate how many images and what size you intend to add per month

Roll this up and you get your bandwidth estimate. I'd then add a bit to be safe.

The main thing to consider is the flexibility of your provider and the hidden costs of going over your bandwidth. Some will allow you to exceed, not tell you and then bill you for it, others will cut you off when you hit your limit, others will contact you and review the account, others may ignore it unless you're massively over the limit. Talk to a provider and ask the questions.

As for PayPal, just use a "Pay Now" button, this is just a bit of HTML code that you can usually generate via a page on the PayPal merchant tools pages and then simply paste into your document. I would suggest for a simple site as you're suggesting you'd not need scripting at this stage.

This is not an offers forum, so I can't quote you, but feel free to ask for a quote You may also want to look in the market place for hosting offers.

[fcolor]

Setting up PayPal payments is very easy and does not require database or scripting knowledge. Concerning bandwidth requirements I can say that most hosts offer very big numbers of bandwidht and if the provide what they claim they do you will not have any troubles.