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 |
Alternately, 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:
| 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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