How to Load Lots of Text Using Less Bandwidth?

Kashinilaya

My Site is going to have plenty of text, but I didn't want it to be costly, in terms of bandwidth. I thougth that many accesses to small files (say, ten accesses to 5Kb files) would be more costly than one access to a larger file (say, 1 access to a 50Kb file), due to hard disk access time (including search time and the waiting time to access the server HD, while other sites are doing it). Reading some posts in this forum I got confused... Some say that small files are better for saving bandwidth. Is it really true?
So, understanding that I want to show several individual texts (i.e., one at a time), my questions are:

should I design my site to load a single large text file, instead of many small text files?

Is there a way to show only the individual parts of the large text file which contains the totality of the texts and hide all the rest from view (i.e., the individual texts would only be shown through a menu, even though in memory they are a single long strip of text)?
I hope I could make myself understood.
Any help is appreciated.

djclue917

If you are really planning to put up a site with plenty of content (mostly text) I would just recommend that you use a CMS. I use Joomla!

You could try other CMSes here:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

And by the way, why are you so concerned with those kinds of stuff? Considering a single file as small as 50 KB and 5 files as small as 10 KB each wont differ greatly in terms of the server overhead they produce.

Anyways, I'm glad that you are actually showing some concern to our shared server. Smile

Kashinilaya

Thank you for your comments, djclue917.
I don't know exactly what CMS is. I learned it stands for Common Management System. It sounds like it's a software to adiminster a forum, like in Frihost. It's not my intention to set up a forum or anything like that. I'm a writer and I want to present some of my work in a personal site.
I don't like to navigate through a site with many pages. Each page load takes too long (and my connection is not the worst in the world).
I never created a site in my life. I have experience in programming, though. I just don't want to create a site that is time consuming to navigate through and burn out my bandwidth due to bad coding.