How much disk space do you need for your web hosting?

You might be enticed to choose a web hosting plan because it advertises “unlimited disk space”.  But how valuable is that disk space?  Read the fine print in the Terms of Service (TOS) and you will find that there are limits in the amount of resources your website can use, thus limiting the amount of traffic and website activity.  If your website visitors can’t view your webpages/content or interact on your website, or even access your website, then what’s the point of the so-called  “unlimited disk space”?!  So how much disk space does your website really need?  It is easy to calculate. (Skip to the last paragraph if you don’t want to do the math.)

1) Calculate the disk space necessary for any software you plan on installing.  Here are the specs for UltimateWB:
UltimateWB Essentials+: around 7 mb
UltimateWB Lite: around 13 mb
UltimateWB Full Version: around 56 mb (includes WordPress and phpbb applications)

2) Guesstimate how many photos, videos, documents your website will have, and what size in kb/mb each file is.  Then just do the math – this number of files multiplied by average file size.  If you plan on adding more photo galleries and other media, you will need to estimate how much you plan on adding and how fast, so that you are not outgrowing your server too fast.  Similarly,  if you are creating a social networking website where you allow photos and videos to be uploaded, you should calculate how much traffic/website activity you will be getting in the early stages.  Then as your website grows, you can upgrade your server as needed.  Choose a scalable web host  such as UltimateWB so that upgrading is an easy process.

3) Database content takes up disk space too.  Dynamic websites use databases; rather than static files taking up disk space it is database tables and fields.  So if you are going to have lots of pages and posts, this is a factor in your disk space.

4) Emails – You will want to consider how many email and attachments you will want to store on the server.

Don’t feel like doing the math and guessing and estimating?  An easy way to go about it is if you have a very simple website, 5 pages, you can start with the 250 mb disk space.  If you are planning a more advanced website, with lots of photos and pages/posts, start with the 2 gb disk space (that’s 2,000 mb).