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It depends greatly on how much "content" you have to deliver as well as how many images you have, how large they are, if they were optimized for size and colors properly and, if you have a cgi-enabled account, the size of the scripts and supporting files and data as well as the tasks they perform. If you already have a web site, or have started to design one, your web design package may tell you how much space you will need.

Most individual web pages should be kept as small as possible to make surfing them quick to the user. The longer it takes to load the page, the less likely your users will be to stay to read them. There are several things you can do to try to make your pages smaller and faster for the surfer, and which will also conserve your web site space.

• The number of colors in the pictures can make a big difference. Most of the time, there is no need to have more than 256 colors for artwork. More color depth requires more room, and will not be visible properly by many browsers. Many browsers are setup in VGA mode or SVGA mode with 256 colors and Windows is NOT the only platform available out there, so the colors chosen should be among what's called the "Web Safe palet", which has 216 colors, all of those 216 colors are common to most platforms and should display properly without dithering.
• Use tables carefully. As a web page is being downloaded, it is displayed incrementally. However when you get to a table, the entire table must be read before any of it can be displayed. If the table is very large, the user will have nothing to read as the page is loaded and may become frustrated.
• Tables are also slow to render when they are too complex or when multiple tables are nested within each other. Avoid too many levels of table nestings if at all possible.
• Use height and width attributes on images. The browser will be able to allow space for the images and then keep loading the page, rather than stopping to load the image, or cause the page to jump around when it does load the images. When the browser doesn't know the size of elements ahead of time, the whole page has to be re-rendered after everything is loaded, that means everything will be erased in the window and re-displayed.
• Some choices of character sets also force some browsers to re-render a page once it's done downloading, so testing on different platforms can help not making those mistakes.

Remember that some people are still using 14.4 modems or even 9600 sometimes. A page that is 100k will take over 30 seconds to come up at 14.4, IF conditions are ideal. Web surfers have a short attention span, if they do not see something of interest in the first 10 seconds or so, they are likely to move on to something else. How fast the page loads is also being influenced by the ISP's servers (the dial-up ISP), network traffic and line noise. You have no control over these things, so the best thing to do is to design a site with this in mind. Make each page as small as possible (in total file size) while still making it look the way you want it to look.

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