Estimate your disc space
For those who are new to web hosting or are thinking of putting up their first website getting the basics right is essential. The first thing that you need to look in to when listing the needs of your website is disc space. What is the amount of data you will be storing on the hard disc of the web server on which your site will be hosted? Normally webhosting accounts come with limited disc space ranging from over 50 MB to less than 1000 MB.
The size of your website will decide the amount of disc space required. If the website is mainly composed of text (html) then the space requirement is minimal. However if the site is to contain a lot of images, flash animations, graphics in the form of videos then you will require a lot of space which is going to be expensive. Use graphics only if they are essential and not under the misconception that they will enhance the beauty of your site. Be cost effective and objective about web space usage.
The ideal size of your webpage, text and images included should be below 50-60 Kb as there are many people who still use slow dial up internet connections of under 56 Kbps. For such a user a 60 Kb page will take more than 8 seconds to load, making a good page size under 30 Kb. Here your endeavor should be to get as much of your message across maintaining the right balance between text and effective images.
With a page size of 30 Kb, a web space of 10 MB will hold 330 pages, which is quite a bit. Keep in mind that this also has an effect on the bandwidth requirement. Bandwidth is the quanta of data transfer permitted per month which includes all uploads and downloads regardless of the protocol used. It also depends on the number of visitors your website will have and the average number of pages they visit. For most websites just being launched you will not require huge amount of either disc space or bandwidth. For starters a hosting account with 10MB of space and 1 GB bandwidth is more than enough.
Once you have your website hosted and running, with increasing traffic and upload and download requirements, you can always update your webhosting package.