For the web hosting newcomer, there are two major factors you need to consider when buying hosting: your storage space allocation, and your data transfer quota. The former is the amount of space you are given on the host’s server to store your pages, content and data. The latter is the amount of data that can be uploaded to and downloaded from your site in a month.

Most hosting packages offer at least 50MB of storage space. You’ll probably find that that’s plenty. It doesn’t sound like a lot nowadays because we’re so used to huge hard disks in our laptops and desktops with tens or hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, but websites need to be relatively small because there are still some people on 56Kbps dialup connections, and you don’t want them to have to wait 20 seconds for your pages to load. The ideal page is about 30KB, and 50-60KB should be your upper limit. Of course, if you’re offering multimedia downloads such as music, video or Flash animation, these things are bound to take up more space, but don’t use these things superfluously (so, unless your website is specifically for music, video or animation). If your pages are 30KB each, 10MB of storage space is room for over 300 pages, so unless you’re running a busy forum, 50MB is more than enough.

Your data transfer quota (often referred to, confusingly, as bandwidth by hosting companies) includes data uploaded and downloaded to and from your site by any means, including HTTP, POP, FTP etc. The data transfer limit you need will depend on how many visitors you’re expecting. 1GB will probably be enough if you’re expecting fewer than 10,000 visitors a month and your site is not full of large files for download like music or video.

To conclude: unless you know that you are going to have a lot of visitors, a very busy forum, or large files for download available on your site, you need not worry about data transfer limits or storage space; 1GB data transfer and 10MB storage will be plenty. However, if you’re hoping your site will grow and become more popular, make sure that your hosting package is scalable: that is, you can easily upgrade to more space and data transfer if you need to. Switching hosts is a hassle and shouldn’t be necessary if you plan ahead in this way.

For more information on domain names and domain name registration questions please feel free to contact Domainmonster.com support team who will be happy to assist you.