What exactly do web hosting companies mean when they talk about “5 gigabyte storage” or “100 megabyte” file size limits? Unless you understand these data measurement terms, you won’t be able to choose a web hosting service appropriate to your needs. So let’s take a bite out of all these “bytes.”

Remember when we talked about how computers need what’s known as “machine language,” made up of ones and zeroes, to understand human information? Well, here’s where that comes into play when figuring out how much data per customer a web hosting service can store.

The word “byte” was coined in 1956 by computer scientist Werner Buchholz to mean the basic unit of data composed of eight binary digits (bits), such as 101010. In computer shorthand, a byte is abbreviated as a capital B. As computers were built to handle bigger and bigger actions on more and more data, new terms were coined to signify these larger amounts. Thus we have “kilobytes” (KB), “megabytes” (MB), “gigabytes” (GB) and even “terabytes” (TB).

It’s only when we begin to factor what these decimal values mean that we start to understand just how much data we’re talking about when a web hosting offers you, say, 10GB of storage space. A kilobyte equals 1,024 bytes. A megabyte equals 1048576 bytes. A gigabyte equals 1073741824 bytes. A terabyte contains over 1 billion bytes.

Now that you know what these terms mean, get your website designer to give you an estimate of the amount of data that makes up your web site. Then you’ll have a better understanding of just how much web hosting space you really need to buy.