Disk Space Considerations When Choosing a Web Host

By James Betchley

When choosing a web host or a web hosting plan, one of the many factors you must consider is how much disk space you require, over the years the cost of memory and the physical size of that memory has fallen. Just look at the capacity of the new iPod when compared to the PCs of old and you will get the picture. The knock on effect of this on you is that the cost of web hosting has fallen dramatically over the last few years and consequently you can get a lot of disk space for a few pounds a month.

So, how do you decide just how much disk space you need?

Well one of the main factors will be the size of your site, and how you expect it to grow over the course of your contract with your web host. This web site for instance takes up approximately 80Mb of disk space, and is growing at a rate of about 5Mb per month, as newer content is added to the main site and to our blog, which is hosted on the same server and contributes to our disk space usage, as will any of your sub-domains. 80Mb sounds quite small, and you would be right in thinking that since most basic web hosting plans offer at least 1Gb of storage, and some offer an awful lot more. But you must also factor in your Email accounts, the number of which will eat up you disk space allowance, and you also need to consider whether you will be uploading media files to your server be they audio, video, documents or programs you wish to make available for download to your customers.

The bottom line is do you have enough to grow?

For instance do you envisage adding a pod cast to your site, a great marketing strategy, but one which will see your disk space usage rocket. When deciding on storage for your web hosting plan take a look at where you want your business to be in 2 years time and choose a deal which can cope with the expansion you require to get to that point and beyond. Conversely chose a hosting provider which will allow you to upgrade and add on additional disk space, bandwidth etc so that you only pay for these feature as it becomes necessary, the key is to think ahead and not get caught out with not enough space to upload your latest product range.

Reviewed 22 Sept 2008 by James Betchley, is the web hosting expert at Which Domain Host.