2. To determine your total site file size, right click on root folder where your web site is housed – this will not only give you total site size but also how many files and folders are contained in your site.

3. If you use an editor, such as FrontPage, go to reports view, click on site summary and you will get a reading of total site file size. In Dreamweaver, just use method in No 2.

Prepare To Expand Your Hosting Plan You may want to add pages, graphics, features eg scripts, databases etc, to your site in future. Begin with a small hosting plan at first (even 5mb is enough to start out with), and then expand it as you add new features.

Check with your web host, if you can easily upgrade your hosting plan as you grow your site. You don't want to go through hassle of changing hosts every few months.

Once you have determined your total site file size, check what hosting plan you have purchased and how much disc space has been allocated for your site. If you are only using 3mb of disc space but are paying for 100mb, then you may want to switch hosting plans and save yourself a ton of money each year.

www.FeaturePrice.com For about $24.95 a month you get to host up to six independent websites with a single account. You get unlimited data storage, unlimited email and a variety of other higher end services, but their bandwidth policy seems hard to understand.

They did shut me down when we had a moderate level of success even though I paid them an extra $300 to get what they called "maximum" bandwidth. I was NOT pleased and promptly moved site (http://www.7dayebook.com) to another host.

www.HostSave.com Host Save is another low price hosting company that delivers a wide range of services for only $6.95 per month. They recently raised their allowable data transfer, but their policy on how much bandwidth you can use at a given time seems non-existent.

www.DotEasy.com For $25 DotEasy offers a domain name purchase along with one year's hosting. Sounds incredible until you read fine print to discover they limit you to 1 Gigabyte of data transfer a month. Not much data once you start getting reasonable site traffic.

The moral here?

Either prepare to have your business shut down mid-stream if you get successful, or pay a few extra bucks each month to ensure you have enough bandwidth and data transfer to operate without any service interruptions.

At a minimum, specifically ask about and read fine print regarding host's policies before it's too late!

Jim Edwards is co-author of best selling ebook:

"33 Days to Online Profits"