The Internet is home to millions of websites that vary in size. With the introduction of advanced designing tools, the size and number of pages have grown exponentially over the last decade. This requires servers to have greater disk space to work efficiently.

Most small sites take only a space of about 10 to 20 Mb, and hence are easily manageable for the host. Depending on the quality and content of each page, such a space can stack up to 500 pages. Earlier, a single hosting account was meant to hold a single website. However, improvements in technology and new marketing strategies have introduced an array of options that vary from a limited to unlimited number of websites that can be operated. Small business can look forward to packages that offer 15 to 50 GB of web space. Medium size businesses can avail of offers ranging from 100 to 3000 GB. Still larger firms can make use of plans that offer even unlimited amount of disk space.

The introduction of virtualization in web hosting has opened a pandora's box of possibilities. The higher end offers of each package are based on the unlimited computing ability and space available over multiple servers that are well connected. These packages offer the freedom for webmasters to design unlimited number of websites, using a single account. This enables to better design the site, incorporate leading links, create highly interactive media, and so on, without having to clamp down on space usage. With the new marketing strategies like blogging being vital to promote products over the net, a huge web space is needed to ensure hassle free interaction with the participants.
Going for plans that offer large web space, brings along with it, features such as front page server extensions, PHP, CGI, ASP, MySQL databases and so on. It enables upload and download of photographs and video clips.

Another fast growing aspect is the availability of bandwidth. This has been a crucial point in the ability of users to access and extract data at will. For common users, bandwidth used, ranges from 3 GB for personal sites to 200 GB for large business systems. Again, virtualization has helped many to offer "unlimited" bandwidth for clients. The concept is misleading, since the hosts base their facts on past average use of the network capacity by users. High bandwidth is required for sites that are accessed for actual data transfer and not merely viewing or reading. Sites that host movies, music files and photographs can be well served by these packages. Adopting such packages must be done with care. Many a times, sites do not need to have unlimited disk space or bandwidth. Web masters must be careful to take what is just right for the site. Another factor to be considered is the location of the targeted audience. This will determine the location of the host and the type of network that is likely to be employed by users. A small site targeted towards a limited area need not have unlimited features to function efficiently. The effect of large bandwidth can be somewhat noticed, when the users access through relatively slower networks. Ample bandwidth on the host side can free up bandwidth for multiple users, even if their local networks are slow.

Web masters should be careful to monitor the performance of the system, when under maximum use. Often these promises fail, when more than one of the client's websites attracts heavy traffic simultaneously. Many hosts claim to have ample redundancy to manage spikes, while in reality, they may engage in virtualization that is just based on probabilities.