Disk Space

Disk space is an important term associated with web hosting services. Knowing approximately how much disk space you need for your website, will be helpful when you are searching for a web hosting package. Disk space will be the amount of space that you receive with your web hosting package.

Any information on your website will be stored in this space. This includes files such as html, scripts and images for your website. Your email accounts that you set up on your hosting plan will also use some disk space. Disk space will make it possible for your email messages to be stored for you so they can be accessed.

The amount of web space you receive with a hosting plan will depend upon the web hosting provider you are utilizing. Different web hosting providers offer, different amounts of disk space. In fact, most hosts offer hosting options with various amounts of disk space depending on the hosting plan you select. A shared hosting provider will be dividing the server into hosting packages for many different websites. The amount of disk space on the server will be divided up among all the hosting plans. Disk space amounts will be dependent upon the amount of disk space on the server and the number of websites hosted on that server.

Today the web hosting industry is very competitive. Just a few short years ago, web hosting services were a lot more expensive. Customers received less for their money with each hosting plan. However, because the market has become so competitive, you can take advantage of great deals. Most hosting packages include generous amounts of disk space at great prices.

More on Disk Space

The majority of web pages are not extremely large. They can average as little as 40-50KB per page. If your web pages are very small like this, your website has the potential to have many pages. You can often host a multi page website, without needing a great deal of disk space. Web pages do get bigger as you add more features and applications to them. If your website includes many graphics and/or databases for example, your website will need more disk space.

Many personal websites are only about 2-3MB in size. Having a hosting package with as little as 25MB is more than enough for many basic personal websites. A hosting package this size allows for room for expansion. More pages or graphics and other features can be added. Small business websites often only use 25-75MB of space. Even these websites do not utilize a great deal of disk space and therefore do not require a hosting package with extremely large amounts of disk space.

For small websites that consist mainly of html files, you can estimate the amount of disk space you need quite easily. We will assume these websites do not have a great deal of graphics used and are not using databases, message boards, offering downloads or other features that require more disk space. Website pages should not be much more than 50K in size. This allows for the pages to load rather quickly and easily when someone is accessing the website. You can take that number and multiply it by the number of pages for your website.

Understanding web space can help you to make a more informed decision when selecting hosting packages. If your website does not have a lot of “bells and whistles” and does not utilize many applications and features, you will not need a hosting package with 1GB or more of disk space in most instances. Therefore, it will not be necessary to pay for a hosting package with that much disk space.