Web Hosting Space and Data Transfer

What is it and how does it effect my web hosting choice

A few years ago, if you were to inquire as to the meaning of web hosting space from an ordinary person in the street, the likelihood was that he or she wouldn't know what it was. However, that has altered drastically and with the developments that have taken place in Social Networking and Open Source on the Internet.

Web Hosting Space Explained

Ignoring the business uses of web space for a slight moment, even if you are just preparing to create a personal presence on the web, a place that you could term as your homepage, you first need to build a website, and for that you will need web hosting space. There are two modes of obtaining web hosting space on the Net, paid or free.

The free web hosting space option is usually offered by hosts that offer web hosting services for free in exchange for them placing advertising on your website or homepage. With this option the features are really quite limited, the paid option on the other hand give you a much more trustworthy platform and is normally chock-full of some great advanced features.

But the common factor linking both models is that you have the ability to upload web pages, files, media files or basically any other kind of documents to a limited web space on a web server that is permanently connected to the Internet.

Data Transfer Explained

Every time someone visits your website, some of your data transfer allowance is used. For example, a page that is 10 kilobytes in size (KB) with images that are 90 KB will use 100 KB of your allowance each time it is visited. Your data transfer allowance is measured in megabytes (MB). 1 MB of data is equal to 1024 KB.