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?

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. On the same server there are also other people hosting their sites. However each one has a specific account.

Now ALL web hosting companies have a common saying about “Unlimited Disk Space” but what is unlimited disk space?

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 web 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 at a big company like Dreamhost (Very unreliable for large traffic peak btw!) or Host Gator (Excellent customer support!), you will notice that somewhere in their TOS , it is mentioned 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 you use your storage for mass archiving or illegally store large files to which you have no copyright to, then you are going to face the constraint of disk space.

To end this post, the advice is: Do not be impressed because a company is giving unlimited disk space. And even if a company claims that it is offering you 100GB or 1000GB disk space, consider the other factors too.

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 2GB right now.

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 resources needed for a file sharing site or lets say a site like Google.com (Yea, kidding).

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

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