We strongly recommend you research before you opt for any web hosting provider. While big companies have an established reputation and offer cheap prices and numerous cool extras, like a free domain name, or discount coupons on some of other services, they may not always handle the big amount of customer requests, since they have a lot of customers. Read reviews, browse relevant threads on forums where users share their experience. You may find out some very useful information. Small and unknown companies, on the other hand, may have an outdated hardware, or rent it with some cheap providers.

The variety of hosting providers and their web hosting plans is so overwhelming, you may get confused. One of the essentials you need to clarify first is the amount of disk space your site requires.

Shared hosting providers offer unlimited space. However, there are disadvantages in these plans, too. Since the resources offered in these plans come as shared, this will affect the speed your website loads. The overall amount of websites sharing the same resource affects the speed of all sites’ response. The amount of traffic received by the sites sharing the same resource affects the speed as well. So, you may experience downtime and slow load on weekends or holidays, for example.

VPS and dedicated hosting plans, on the other hand, offer guaranteed resources for your website to respond quickly whenever you experience an influx of traffic. They often come cheaper than shared hosting plans. However, they do not offer unlimited disk space.

Here are a few tips to help you make up your mind. Whereas, some websites require unlimited storage, others don’t. Depending on the category of your website you can decide which option suits you better.

Sites that require unlimited space are membership sites and those hosting videos and other multimedia. Whereas membership sites can potentially develop large traffic, and sites hosting videos require a lot of disk space as is, the conclusion is logical.

Corporate websites, personal websites and blogs, small business websites normally require basic web hosting plans with little entry fee and not much disk space, unless they host a lot of video material. Sites using WordPress, Drupal or Joomla as content management system typically do not require large disk space. A typical WP small business website is a few hundred megabytes in size, including all the media on the site. We hope these tips will help you understand the basics of web hosting and disk space choice.