Hosting companies often advertise their offers by quoting the storage space and the allowed transfer rate per month. Some hosting companies even quote how much RAM can be allocated at one time.
There are three different variables you can compare: Bandwidth, Hard Disk Space and RAM.
1. Bandwidth
Assuming that a typical 1 million pixel image can be about 400 Kilobytes when all pixels are filled, then each users will need to download about 450KB bytes of data to view the grid (add 50KB for the additional HTML).
– 100 downloads per month: 0.43 GB per month
– 1,000 downloads per month: 4.3 GB per month
– 10,000 downloads per month: 43 GB per month
– 1,000,000 downloads per month: 429 GB per month
The above numbers are for a worst-case scenario when all pixels are filled. Typically, the average case would be about half of that.
It is best to look for a hosting company that offeres a lot of bandwith in their plan.
2. Hard Disk Space
The script needs very little hard disk space. A typical 1 million pixel image can be about 400 Kilobytes when all pixels are filled. Additionally, the database can be from about 600KB to 2MB. Hosting companies offer at least 5 GB of hard disk space, some even offer a dozen GB. Hard disk space is really not an issue.
3. Random Access Memory (RAM)
This figure is often not quoted by hosting companies, especially for shared hosting accounts. The script is designed to run under 8MB, which is the default allocated RAM for PHP. Please be aware that memory requirements increase if you choose to have a grid bigger than one million pixels.
– Grid with 1 million pixels – 4MB RAM needed to process the image, just under 8MB needed to process an image with a background
– Grid with 2 million pixels – minimum 8MB RAM needed
– Grid with 4 million – min 16MB RAM needed
– Grid with 8 million – min 32MB RAM needed
– Grid with 10 million – min 40MB RAM needed (it would be impossible to allocate this much RAM on most hosting accounts)
As you can see, a grid with 10 million pixels would be infeasible. Not only it will take a lot of RAM, but it will also take a long time to download.
The script is very much optimized when serving the grids, and it only needs the very minimum to display the grid. The above RAM requirements are for the script's Admin and Advertiser's sections.