Disk Storage allocated on your Web Hosting Plan
Disk storage refers to the amount of disk space you are allocated on your web hosting company's server according to the hosting plan you are signed up to. Cheaper plans will generally have less storage space than more expensive hosting packages.
Because computer storage space is becoming cheaper and cheaper, web hosts are able to offer increased disk space for low prices compared with a few years ago. Take for example Hostgator, who are one of the most respected web hosts. Let's take a look at their disk storage allocation for their shared hosting plans:
- Hatchling
- $4.95 per month
- 350GB disk storage
- Baby
- $7.95 per month
- 600GB disk storage
- Swamp
- $12.95 per month
- 1000GB disk storage
Now let's compare this with another very popular host and Hostgator competitor, LunarPages:
- Basic Hosting
- $4.95 per month
- 1.5GB disk storage
- Business Hosting
- $21.95 per month
- Unlimited storage
- Windows Hosting
- $9.95 per month
- 5GB disk storage
- Dedicated Hosting
- $99 per month
- 80GB to 250GB disk storage
- Linux Virtual Private Servers
- $39.95 per month
- 20GB disk storage
Disk Storage comparison
Hostgator obviously provide a lot more disk storage space, but how many people will actually use it? Hostgator are able to offer such large numbers as they know that 99% of their customers will never use 1000GB or even 350GB of data storage so it is no loss to advertise such impressive numbers. This is clever on the part of Hostgator and is great for customers as you are getting real value for money on such inexpensive hosting plans.
Watch for hosts offering unlimited disk storage. In reality there are always limits exposed as eventually they would simply run out of hard disk space. Although storage is cheaper these days than ever before it is still not free, therefore hosts can not truly offer unlimited disk space to all customers. They simply know that the majority of their customers will never use a fraction of the unlimited disk storage advertised so it is a clever marketing tactic.
Disk storage is taken up by website pages, images, scripts and everything else that your website requires to run. Put simply, if you upload something via FTP to your host server then you are using disk storage space. Dedicated server customers usually have an entire hard drive to themselves or at least a dedicated partition on a larger hard drive. This means you are not sharing that part of the hard drive with other customers and this results in faster access times.