How much disk space that suitable for web hosting?

If you are looking out to purchase a new web hosting account for your business, you would definitely have come across the question about how much storage space your account needs.

This is dependent on many factors, which you should plan accordingly. Although many hosts offer Unlimited Hosting space, some people prefer to pay as they go and take up a fixed space plan.

These work out cheaper and also offer more server resources per plan. This article helps you decide how much disk space you really need in your web hosting account.

Emails

A large part of your web hosting account would be taken up by email services that you may use. You need to determine how and where you will store your emails and for how long you will retain them on the server.

You also need to determine, between mail download intervals, how much mail are you expecting per day. This means that assuming you don’t download mails in the night, how much space will the total nightly mails take up on your server. This can be crucial in ensuring continuous web hosting services so that your account doesn’t get full.

Website

How much storage space your website will need is dependent on the nature of website that you have. If you have a CMS based website or blog which gets updated on a regular basis, you may need more space from time to time.

If you have a static website in HTML, you will be able to gauge the amount of space that will be taken up over a long period of time.

It’s best to do a test run of your website, with a small pilot site which will contain your designs and layout, before you jump into a full fledged website.

File Storage

Some people install file storage and retrieval apps on their web hosting account. These apps help to manage and store files using the same hosting space.

If you are planning to do that, and your web host allows you to use your space for storage, then you need to plan for this additional space accordingly.

If you are allowing multi user access to the file storage, you many want to setup quotas or restrict the amount of space each user can consume, else your space may go unmonitored and be exhausted in an instant.

Visitor's Files

If you allow visitor’s to upload files or submit attachments with their forms, you may need to consider this as a factor for counting storage space.

A client of ours used to allow his visitors to upload screenshots of their computer along with their website form. One day, his entire hosting account was jammed because a visitor had uploaded a 100 MB attachment on his account.

This blocked his email and other services, which had already consumed over 80% of storage space. You can restrict file sizes and file types for visitors, so that you don’t run out of space.

However, it is best not to allow visitors to upload attachments in their forms as far as possible, especially in comment forms which may become subject to spam and advertising.

Databases

MySQL databases usually contain very little data and are rarely a cause for disk space limits being hit, however, they are also the most neglected when it comes to calculating your space.

If you have a CMS system which will be storing all your content and website pages, you should estimate this requirement and opt for the right amount of space accordingly.