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Unfortunately, quite a few hosting companies impose unexpected charges in other areas. There may be a charge, for example, if you want to keep your domain with the same host but switch to a different hosting package, perhaps because you've outgrown the one you're on. This charge may be similar to the initial registration fee.

It's well worth checking on this kind of hidden cost before signing up, whether for web hosting or just to register a domain. If the answers aren't clearly given on the company's website, then ask - on the phone, or even better in an email, so the answer is written down - what charges would be involved if you wanted to do such-and-such, presenting a scenario such as moving your domain to a different package or to a different host. The salesperson is then obliged to tell you all the charges that would be incurred, without you having to guess at extra 'services' that you didn't even realise were involved.

Limits and penalties

As you'd expect, there are limits of one sort or another to most hosting packages. There are two basic resources that you're using: disk space and bandwidth. Both of these have got vastly cheaper in recent years, so providers shouldn't be mean with them, but they still usually impose a ceiling. The maximum amount of storage space you're allocated dictates how much content you can include in your website, or, if you're using your web space to store backup files or exchange files with other users, the amount of data you can leave on the server.

A personal website containing

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little content except a few hundred photos should comfortably fit within a couple of hundred megabytes, but a more ambitious site might need a gigabyte or more, and if you want an online home for a complete backup of your hard disk (which might be a bit unrealistic), you'd be looking for a lot more again.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that moves over the host's Internet connection or 'pipe'. The total capacity of the pipe is shared between all the host's users, so unless it comfortably exceeds the amount of traffic that users are generating, the host will want to impose some sort of limit to prevent hyperactive users slowing everything down. You're using bandwidth when you upload web pages to the server, add content such as photos and upload or download other files, and anyone who visits your website is using bandwidth within your allowance too.

It used to be common for hosts to cap the number of users who could access your website at the same time, or the amount of traffic at any given moment, but these days the limit is more often quoted as a total monthly quantity of data transfer. This is usually in the tens or hundreds of gigabytes, so you'd only exceed it if you created a very popular website indeed, or one that offered huge files such as lengthy videos for download, which won't apply to most users.

If you plan to use your web space for file transfer or backup, though, these limits can be much more significant. And don't assume that because most companies have fairly generous limits, there's no need to check. The limits vary a lot, and you may be surprised to find it's sometimes the more 'professional' or business-oriented providers that impose lower limits, ostensibly because they need to manage resources more tightly to guarantee performance levels.

It's also important to check what happens if you exceed the limits. Is your site disabled for a period, for example, or will you just receive an email politely inviting you to upgrade your package? At worst, you may automatically incur additional charges for each extra megabyte of data. That could add up to a substantial amount before you even realise.