Knowing Your Hosting Needs
I write this article especially for people who are new to web hosting. This is why I will only talk about the basic needs (in a shared hosting environment): space, bandwidth. Most of the people looking for advanced features (scripting, databases) already know what they want/need anyway.
So let’s start with the space. Web space (disk space) is the amount of data you can store on the hard disk of the web server. Each web hosting accound comes with a certain amount of space, usually over 50 MB and less than 1000 MB.
Obviously, the amount of needed space depends on the size of the website. Most websites are composed of html (text) pages with a few images (gifs or jpegs) or even a little bit of Flash animation. Text is very economical; it occupies very little space. Images and flash are more expensive; they require a lot of space. If you’re new to the web you might think it’s great to have a lot of colorful images to make your website really beautiful. Don’t make this common mistake!