Web page hosting

When looking for the best available web page hosting, the next element to consider is the amount of disk space and bandwidth you will be getting for your money.

3. Space and bandwidth

Though it is generally agreed that most web sites only use about 5MB of disk space, and some hosts still offer plans with a 50MB limit, there are problems with such limited allocations.

While your site may not need much disk space at first, if it becomes successful, you may decide to add a blog which gets a lot of traffic and needs more space, or a datafeed for products, which will take up a huge amount of space. Or, you may decide to host videos, for information or marketing purposes.

You don't want to hamstring your efforts, or end up paying your host excess charges, so it is worth looking for a host for a new site which has a reasonable disk space allocation. Unless you are very sure your site will always remain small, look for 1GB of disk space or more.

Bandwidth, the amount of data transfer which goes from your site, is recorded by every hosting service, and most hosting plans specify how much you can have every month. (As your site will be on a machine which is shared by other customers, this ensures that everyone's site pages can be served resonably fast).

When studying the bandwidth amount offered by a hosting plan, remember that most sites use less than 5GB a month. Unless you are planning to host an image or video archive, or a site with unlimited product pages, a plan offering 50GB of data transfer a month will be ample. If you are unsure, and expect your site to really take off, choose a host where you can upgrade your plan if required. If you are expecting to get 15000GB of traffic a month (a common bandwidth offering from popular hosts) you are probably a professional web marketer and you should be looking at a more reliable dedicated hosting service instead.

What you should not do is sign up with a host which offers 'unlimited' bandwidth: such providers never last long, as their business plan is either nonexistent or unrealistic.

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