How To Wisely Choose A Good WebHost – Unlimited Disk Space

The question of how to choose a web host is asked everyday. Choosing a proper web hosting service is the key to the success of any web based project. All of us need hosting, that is a place where the files of a website are saved and are accessed by the whole world.

So how to choose the perfect host for your website? I’ll answer this question for you in 5 simple posts which will follow during the next five days.

Unlimited Disk Space in Web Hosting

The first thing you must know before buying a host is to know what you will do with the website(s). You have some basic choices:

• Shared Server
• Virtual Private Server
• Dedicated Server

Most of us uses Shared Server. A shared server is basically like a computer that is being used by many people. For example this blog Island Crisis is on a shared server and almost ALL blogs and small to medium websites are like this too. On the same server there are also other people hosting their site. However each one has a specific account.

Now ALL web hosting company have a common saying about “Unlimited Disk Space” when they offer their services.

What does this really mean? To answer your question I will ask you another question. Is there any hard disk that has an unlimited capacity of storage? No! So the Unlimited Disk Space slogan is a lie! Ok I wont be hard on hosting companies, but the truth is that this slogan is simply used because…well because everyone is using it.

But the truth is that website hosting companies know that even with a very big site you cannot be using over 5GB of diskspace! And this applies for EVERY host! Whether you are at a small web hosting company or even a “suppose-to-be” big company like Dreamhost (Very unreliable for large traffic peak IMO) or Host Gator (depend on which package), you will notice that somewhere in their TOS or conditions, it is said that you have unlimited disk space for your website needs only!

This means that you can use any amount of disk space for the website (i.e content, images, some files) but if ever you start to do warez file storage you will simply get a warning notice that this is not allowed in case you are exceeding their REAL LIMIT that you have for the storage! Most web host has about 1GB to 10 GB storage limit per account when they say they give unlimited disk space.

Why they say this is because as I just said it, they know and any web hosting technician know that no websites can use so much disk space. So this Unlimited Disk Space is just a marketing keyword used by webhosting companies.

To end this post, the advice is do not be simply impressed because a company is giving unlimited disk space. And even if a company if saying he is giving you 100GB or 1000GB disk space (this is a new strategy now), consider the other factors as disk space if is over 2GB itself is more than enough and most companies who pretend to give unlimited disk space will not even give you more than 2GB REAL disk space.

Just for an example, my own hosting account is currently hosting 9 websites and 2 of them are of the same rating (concerning traffic) as Island Crisis yet my total disk space usage is not even more than 0.6GB right now but I have 10GB.

Remember Disk Space is not a real issue unless you are going to make a file storage site but then if you are thinking of doing a file storage site, a shared server is not even recommended! You will need to have your own dedicated server for it as no shared server will give you the resource needed for a file sharing site or lets say a site like Google.com lol.

The next post will talk in more details about Unlimited Bandwidth and how to choose a proper bandwidth amount for your hosting need.