A technical requirement that you need to consider while getting your site hosted is how much disk space you will be needing and you much bandwidth you will be using. Disk space basically means the amount of hard drive disk space you are allowed to use from your hosting service.

The hosting company offers a certain amount of disk space along with every package. Everything that you put into your website, your documents, images, animations need to be stored in the server and must fit into this storage space. It’s just the way you use your hard disk space on your personnel computer. It’s just that here we are dealing with the hard disk space on the server computer. This space is filled by your web pages which get stored on this server. It’s easy to estimate how much space you will need. Your web page will take similar amount of storage on the server as it takes on your hard disk. So just checking the size of your webpage folder on your PC will tell you much server space you need. It’s always better to go with a package that has some extra space than you need so that you can later on upgrade your website.

Another important concept of web hosting is bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. In computer networks, bandwidth is often used as a synonym for data transfer rate – the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period. If bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway, traffic is the number of cars.

Thus, in case of a website having a 10MB net connection, if a 2MB mp3 is being downloaded by a maximum of 5 people simultaneously, no one has to wait. But if 6 people are doing it, there is a traffic of (2×6) 12MB being created, where as bandwidth is just 10MB. Thus someone has to wait. This is the significance of bandwidth and traffic.