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The cost of an account on this site is based on the amount of hard disk space you need and the network traffic generated on your behalf. It does not matter how many people are accessing or managing your collections at any given time.

Accounts are billed monthly, using a credit card. The first month is free and you may cancel your account at any any time. For your security, we use PayPal to handle your payments, which means that we will not have access to any of your credit card information.

Overview
Account Monthly Price Disk Space Monthly Network Traffic Domain Name
Basic $50 1 Gigabyte 20 Gigabytes No
Standard $100 2.5 Gigabytes 50 Gigabytes Yes
Enhanced $300 10 Gigabytes 200 Gigabytes Yes

The Standard and Enhanced accounts include domain name support. With this feature, you can use the domain name of your choice to provide access to your account (including public access to your collections). Otherwise, your URLs will use minaret.info as the domain name. We do not offer domain registration but companies like Go Daddy provide this service in a reliable and inexpensive manner.

As used here, a gigabyte is 1 billion bytes and a megabyte is 1 million bytes. Additional disk space is $5 per 100 megabytes, or fraction thereof, per month. Additional network traffic is $2.5 per gigabyte, or fraction thereof, per month.

You can check your disk usage and network traffic on your account management page. You can also configure your account to send you nightly, weekly and monthly summaries of these figures. Keep in mind that you control which (if any) of your databases are publicly accessible and which require your permission for access.

Disk Space
This section provides some guidance on how much disk space your collections might require when stored on this site. These estimates are based on average record lengths and your mileage may vary. When you load a MARC record into Minaret 3 database, it will use between 10 to 14 times more disk space in the database than as a MARC record. You can estimate how much space you will need by MARC exporting your data records and multiplying by 14 (if you want to be conservative). Add to this number 3 megabytes (3,000,000 bytes), which is the size of an empty Minaret database, for an approximate total database size.

Typical book, sound and visual material records are around 1,500 bytes in a MARC file and take up to 21,000 bytes in a Minaret database. Archival and museum records are often 4,500 bytes and longer and can take up to 63,000 bytes in a database. Using these values, you may be able to maintain the following number of records into your account:

Number of Records with No Images
Account 1,500 Byte Records 4,500 Byte Records
Basic 47,000 15,000
Standard 117,500 37,500
Enhanced 470,000 150,000

Johannes Vermeer: The Kitchen MaidAlternately, you may have images of your collections on this server. A 16,000 byte (16K) compressed JPEG file can display a 4.5 by 5 inch color image (see sample, at right). The following table shows how many records you may be able to store with an associated 16K image:

Number of Records with 16K Images
Account 1,500 Byte Records 4,500 Byte Records
Basic 26,900 12,500
Standard 67,000 31,500
Enhanced 269,000 126,000

Another approach is to have two images per record: a small thumbnail image of 4K bytes (see sample, below) which links to a larger (7.5 by 8 inch) 39K image (click on the thumbnail). This combination requires 43K per pair of images, allowing you to store the following number of records:

Enlarge image in a new window
Number of Records with a 43K Image Pair
Account 1,500 Byte Records 4,500 Byte Records
Basic 15,500 9,400
Standard 38,500 23,500
Enhanced 155,500 94,000

Network Traffic
This section provides some guidance on how much monthly network traffic your account might generate on this site. As with the previous section on disk space, these are only estimates and your experience may vary. In addition to users searching your databases, you will also generate traffic when you import and export data into and out of your databases.

A typical search page on this site returns around 10,000 bytes of data (or 10K). This is true of the search results summary screen and with each record that is displayed individually. Because you can modify the display forms that are provided with this site and because record sizes vary, you may want to adjust the following numbers accordingly. Most web browsers have an option to display information about the web page you are currently looking at, including its size in bytes. This information can be found in Internet Explorer on the "File" menu under "Properties" and in Netscape on the "View" menu under "Page Info".

The following table shows how many 10K, 26K (a 10K record plus a 16K image) or 53K (a 10K record plus a 4K thumbnail and a 39K full sized image) requests an account could serve per month without being changed for additional network traffic:

Requests Per Month
Account 10K Requests 26K Requests 53K Requests
Basic 2 million 769,000 512,500
Standard 5 million 1.9 million 1.28 million
Enhanced 20 million 7.69 million 5.1 million

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