When you're setting up a website, whether it's for personal or business use, and whether you use paid or free web services, you are creating a collection of data that will be accessed through the Web. Just as the data and files you create on your computer require free disk space on your hard drive where they will be stored and accessed, data kept and accessed on the web needs storage space, which is provided by a web hosting company.

Webspace is, quite simply, storage space for data on the Internet. You can use free space to store and display your website. The information and files you place on your site and in your web storage space can include the basic structure of your pages, text, images, audio files, videos, and more. The amount of space your site uses is the total amount of disk space used by all of the individual files added together. When you choose the free web hosting package from Freeservers, you receive free webspace to store and display your free web page.

Whatever you choose to include on your website will require storage space. Different files, however, can vary greatly in the amount of free space they require. An HTML file, for instance, often takes up very little storage space, while an image file from a photo you took with your digital camera can be very large and require a great deal of free data storage space.

Webspace is typically measured in bytes. You may be familiar with this measurement of file size from seeing how your computer reports the sizes of files it stores as well as how much storage space its hard drive has. A byte is, in computer technology's current state, a very small amount of data that requires a small amount of storage space. Therefore, it's likely that you will most frequently hear data storage measurement discussed in larger increments. A kilobyte, or KB, is approximately equivalent to 1,000 bytes. A megabyte, or MB, is even larger at approximately 1,000 kilobytes. Gigabytes (GB) are also commonly referred to; a gigabyte is approximately equivalent to 1,000 megabytes.

The number of pages and the size of the files you place on your website will determine the amount of webspace that it uses. As with any type of storage, there are limits to the amount of free storage space for websites. With Freeservers you can choose the amount of space that you need. Our free web hosting, starter web hosting, and personal web hosting packages offer a variety of disk space size limits. Please note that disk space limits are not the same as file size limits. File size refers to the storage space required by an individual file, while webspace refers to the total space required by all the files that together make up your website. A file you upload must be smaller than the file size limit and must also fit into the disk space that you have free.

The amount of free space you need for your website depends upon what types of files you wish to add to your site, as well as how many files you wish to add. Because media files like photos, videos, and music require a large amount of storage space, your site will require more free disk space if you intend to host these types of files. If you are creating a site for your family and friends, placing a photo album is a great way to share snapshots and memories, but it will require extra storage space. If you wish to include only images that do not need to be of particularly high quality or large size, it is often possible to optimize these for the web and reduce the amount of free disk space that they use.

To determine how much storage space you need, add together the size of all the files you know you want to host on your website, and then think about the room you'll need to have free for adding more files and expanding your site in the future. You may want to leave enough free room to double your current space requirement. This space estimate will help you to determine which of Freeservers' web hosting packages is right for you as you build your website.