When You Should Choose A Hosting Plan With Plenty Of Space

There's a lot to go through when you're looking for a new website hosting plan, but one of the most important factors to consider is how much disk space you have. Many shared server plans - which are often very cheap - claim to offer 'unlimited' disk space - this is something of a misnomer, and usually shouldn't be trusted. After all, disk space is limited by the size of the physical disk the website is hosted on.

The amount of disk space you have will depend on the amount of money you're paying for your package, and on the kind of server your website is being hosted on - shared, virtual, dedicated or cloud. Before you commit to any one particular package, it's important that you make yourself aware of the amount of disk space you're going to get from it.

There are some other things to bear in mind about disk space and web hosting, too, so we've put together this quick and handy guide to some of the ways that available disk space can affect your hosting requirements.

Sites That Need A Large Amount Of Space

  • Membership Sites
    Most of the kinds of websites that have membership bases also need a lot of space - after all, you'll need to store an ever-growing quantity of information about those members, and they're likely to be uploading content or making posts all the time. This means that you need to be able to scale the space you have open to you pretty easily, and that you need a web host who is generous with their allowances.
  • Sites That Host Videos
    Video files can be very large indeed - often a gigabyte or more - and all that size needs plenty of room to live in. This is especially important for streaming sites that update with new video frequently, as they're likely to grow and grow in terms of their disk space requirements.

Sites That Do Not Need Such An Amount Of Space

  • Corporate Websites
    Anything using modern content management systems like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla is unlikely to need the kind of huge tracts of space that websites built and coded in other ways will require. These systems are, after all, pretty compact and efficient.
  • Small Business WebsitesThere's a good chance that your small business site will have been built using a modern CMS - usually WordPress - and that it won't need more than a couple of shortish videos. This means that your space requirements are likely to be pretty minimal.
  • Personal Websites and Blogs
    Most personal blogs and sites are likely to remain pretty compact, even if you post a lot - assuming that what you're posting isn't mostly video. You shouldn't need more than a very standard amount of space to keep a personal site or a blog online.

Whatever you decide, it's important that you bear in mind your requirements - don't restrict yourself by getting less than you need, and don't waste money by getting more than you need either.