subject: Get Inexpensive Web Hosting Within Your Reach Tomorrow [print this page] Choosing a hosting provider for storing your files online really depends on what files you intend to store through web hosting and the needs or purpose of this storage. Data storage is a large part of internet website hosting. There are a number of reasons a website may need to host some files online, such as steaming music, podcasting, hosting games and video streaming to name just a few.
The first thing a potential website owner needs to decide on is how much space they are going to need on their website for these files. This will be the easiest choice for you as you will be entirely in control of your own file storage and you will have your files stored in the same domain as your website and within your own servers. However, there are several performance issues that can arrive from this if you have more traffic than your servers can handle as hotlinks may take up your bandwidth.
There are other remote hosting options that you may want to look at, like Box.net, that give you a remote choice for storing your files. These websites allow you to upload your files to their server and hotlink the files from there. This will save you a large amount of bandwidth since you will not have to host your own files, and it will also allow you to store a large amount of files on the host.
If you simply wish to store image files then you can probably get away with storing them securely on image hosting sites. Online image directories such as Flickr, Imageshack and other such image hosting directories may be a good solution for you to remotely host your pictures. With these sites though, you may reach a bandwidth cap if you have too many high resolution images.
In any case, as you can see, selecting which method to safely store files through web hosting is really dependent on the purpose for file storage and the type of files involved. There are numerous different choices that you will be able to select from, so you will want to take some time and figure out what the best choice is for your specific needs.
