Step 4. Space, Bandwidth, Features

Web pages (html) are normally very small - on average 50 - 100KB. This means we can store a lot of web pages in a small amount of diskspace. Images take up more space, but unless we have a big database driven site - it is unlikely that we will need very much disk space.  (A rough example to how much disk space we might need for our site: 300 webpages with lots of graphics need 25 MB).
 

Bandwidth is a commodity that costs the web hosting company money - unlimited bandwidth is not only impossible, but would cost an unlimited amount of money. When web hosts offer unlimited bandwidth they are trying to trick us. They know that we will probably not use very much bandwidth. The moment we try to use a lot of bandwidth - then we will find our website shutdown. (A rough example to how much bandwidth we might need for our site: 30,000 visitors per month with lots of graphics need 25 GB per month).

Email Accounts:
Normally 5 - 10 email accounts is enough, but if we think we might want more then we can choose feature that offer more.

Features like Databases, Server Side Scripting, etc:
Web hosting plans can offer a myriad of confusing features. For the small website it is unlikely that we will ever need to know about any of them. If we are a web designer creating complex database driven sites then we will already know what we need. If after creating our site we have never heard of ASP, ColdFusion, SQL Server, mySQL - then chances are that we don't need to worry about any of these things. If we plan to add a message board to our website then we will need a mySQL database. This is the most common database used with discussion boards.