Which website hosting providers offer enough disk space for my website?

This is a tough one for newbies. How the heck do you know how big your website will be? You’ll need enough disk space and bandwidth, but what does that mean?

Disk space just means the amount of space all your website pages and related files (such as graphics) take up on your host’s server. Still, how do you know how much space they will take up?

The short version: Unless you're planning a huge site, most plans will do. And if you need more disk space, all you need to do is upgrade your plan.

But it's important to me that you have all the information you need to make an informed decision, so I researched this further.

Web design pro Stephen Bradley of Van SEO Design wrote a good article on this subject:

How Much Space Do You Need with Your Hosting Account?

But I still found it a bit confusing due to my difficulty translating gigabytes to megabytes to kilobytes, etc. So I created a chart, which I hope will help you make sense of Bradley’s advice:

Byte Conversion Chart

Even after all this, I didn't get it. :-(

I hate to admit this, but even after reading Bradley’s article and making my chart, I was confused. So Mr. Bradley was kind enough to offer me yet more explanation:

“It's actually not as hard to figure out as you might think. The space is just the sum total of all the file sizes that will be on the server. Start with the basic html page. The file size of any page could certainly vary, but the actual html file tends to be on the smaller side. For example I downloaded the home page of your site and the file is about 16kb. That's just the code and doesn't include the size of the images that page uses or any external css or javascript files that the html links to.

“It looks like your home page has about 30KB of images and doesn't link to external files. 16 + 30 = 48. Let's round up and call it 50KB and let's assume your other pages are all the same size. So 20 pages will be 1MB. 200 pages would be 10MB. 20,000 pages would be about 1GB.

“Odds are your site is never going to get to 20,000 pages. If you have 1GB disk space for hosting you shouldn't have to worry for a long time about filling up the space.

“Now there are actually a few other things that end up sitting on the server. Email is often saved on the server and your server logs will also be saved on the server. It's hard to know how much space each will take, but both are text files and text files are usually small when it comes to file size. You could also have a database storing information, but again that's usually text that's stored and won't take up much space.

“Truthfully you won't ever really know the disk space you're using by adding up all the file size. Fortunately most hosting accounts will usually tell you how much space you're using.”

So basically, any decent host will have enough disk space for you. And if you do need more space, it’s simple to upgrade.

In fact, just to be sure of that, I requested a live chat at Host Gator and got customer service rep Shaun. I asked him if it would be hard to upgrade and this was his answer:

“It would not be hard at all you would just fill out the upgrade form. To upgrade your account please fill out this form https://secure.hostgator.com/upgrade.php”

This experience also says good things about Host Gator’s customer service. It took just a few seconds to get Shaun on the live chat. Altogether it took four minutes to have the whole conversation.

As always, if you have any questions, just contact me. By now, I ought to be an expert on the subject. ;-)