When buying web hosting, one of the factors to be considered is how much web space you need. It is important to select a package that has enough web space for your needs. Provide yourself with enough disk space so that you can add to your website in the future. This is especially important for business websites which can be forever changing and growing. The size of all the files you want to put on your website will tell you the minimum amount of space that you require.
The majority of your files on your website will be html files, image files and maybe some program files and scripts. If your website has a database, you need enough space to include your database files and everything that supports your database. Perhaps, your site will offer downloads, which will also affect the amount of web space you will need. You will also want to make sure you have enough web space for emails that you will download in the future and for any historical server logs that you will want to keep.
HTML files are generally small with usually only one file per page on the website. There are usually more image files than HTML files and they are much larger in size. Your website might have several image files per page. One image file can be as large as an entire web page’s HTML file. If your website will have a lot of images, you need a fair amount of space. The size of any databases on your website will also affect your disk space. Database files will vary depending on how much data is being stored in the database. If you have 30 items in your database, you will use a lot less space than have you have 3000.
On average, websites are no larger than 5 or 6 pages. Assuming the average size of a page is about 25k, you can store about 800 pages on 20MB of space. If your website does have a database, you could easily use 10MB of space, but you would still have room to store about 400 pages. Selling products on your website, can quickly reduce your web space.
For most personal websites, between 10-50MB will provide enough space to host the website. For those who have a rather large personal website, they may want to look for a web host that offers up to 100MB of space. Most small business websites will need anywhere from 100MB to 1GB of storage space. On average, small businesses need a hosting plan offering about 400MB of space. Large businesses often need a few Gigabytes of space to host their website. In some cases they may want to pay for a dedicated server so that they may have a whole server to themselves. The storage space on dedicated servers ranges from 6GB to 160GB.
To better determine how much web space you need, remember that a single page should not be much more than 0.05MB. You do not want viewers to have to wait a long time for your page to load (which can happen if a single page or file is too large). Keeping this in mind, you can estimate how much web space you need by deciding about how many pages your website will be and multiplying the number of pages by .05 MB. When you perform this equation, you can arrive at the approximate amount of disk space you will need. You may want to add a bit of space to your calculation to allow room to expand your website and to take into account log files you may retain.