When you start looking at your web host, you’ll see two terms, or features mentioned quite a lot. These are storage and bandwidth and often have limits applied. However, some web hosts offer unlimited storage and bandwidth.
Storage:
If we’re talking about shared web hosting, each portion of a web server can store and therefore offer a certain amount of storage. Storage, in web hosting terms, refers to the amount of data your server can hold. Data includes content, images, HTML, scripts and more. If storage is difficult to get your head around, try visualising a bookcase at home. There’s plenty of places to store items, but at some point, the space will run out.
When you sign up to your web host, you may prefer to seek one that offers unlimited storage. If you can’t anticipate how much storage your website might need, this is a much safer bet. However, most web pages don’t actually exceed 3MB. Bear this in mind; there are some awesome web hosts out there like SiteGround who don’t offer unlimited storage but offer plenty for your needs.
Bandwidth:
Bandwidth is slightly more complicated than storage, simply because it’s a little harder to explain. Once your website is live and you start getting visitors, your website data gets pinged (transferred) from your site to the user. This is the method in which your website visitors can actually see the content on your website.
If your website is image or video-heavy, you may require more bandwidth. Content like images and text actually get downloaded when someone visits your website. The more people you have visiting your website, the more bandwidth you will need. A lot of entry web hosting plans offer enough bandwidth to support 10,000 visitors. This equates to about 10GB of bandwidth which should be enough to get you by. However, as I’ve already mentioned, if you foresee your website gaining more than 10,000 visitors per month, you may want to revise your bandwidth needs.