In today's budget web hosting market, hosting companies are offering over 5 gb of storage and 250 gb of bandwidth for $5 to $7 per month. Historically, small business and website designers used these plans to host websites, and more often individuals are using these sites for personal web pages. But with the size of today's hosting plans coupled with the digital age, there are numerous ways to use these hosting plans other than for just hosting a website. Hostchart has come up with seven uses for a budget hosting plan that are worth $5 per month, excluding the common business uses.

7. Email accounts: Are you tired of having @aol.com or @bellsouth.net for your email address? Why not have yourfirstname@yourlastname.com as your email address? You can create an address for each member of your family. Typical hosting plans will provide 30 up to an unlimited amount of email accounts.

6. Online photo album: Who doesn't have a digital camera these days? Online photo albums are a perfect way to share your photos with family and have them backed up in case your computer crashes. Web hosting plans have security that will allow you to have login security to view pages if you do not want the whole world to see your vacation pictures.

5. Backup drive: With the digital age, we store everything on our computers. We store our songs, pictures, email, online bank statements, tax info, and videos on our home computers. Do you really make a backup cd of all that data? Are you prepared if your computer crashes? For $5 per month you can use a low cost hosting plan as a backup drive. If you copy your files to folders on your hosting plan just like they were on a folder on your computer, they are backed up daily for you automatically.

4. Mp3 and video storage for sharing and remote access: You can store all of your song files on your hosting plan, and then you will be able to load them into your mp3 player from any internet connection. No longer will you have to be at home to do this. Also, you can give your friends access and share your songs with them, with no more swapping players or burning cds to share with friends.

3. Forum boards: All affordable hosting plans that hosting companies offer have a set of free pre-built applications for you to use, and these always include a forum board. Forums are an excellent way for your extended family, team, class, or friends to communicate. You set up different topics and people can read and participate in what they want to. Using group email lists inevitably includes a lot of people on conversations meant for just a few. Forums allow you to be active in the conversations you want and ignore the others. Plus, it's a great way to post information and news for a group to see.

2. You own an Expert Technician: You can use your web hosting plan for its 24x7 FREE support. You can call or email them any time of day and have any of your internet related questions answered. Example questions a technician would answer include:

- I'm using this free program to build a homepage and I am having a problem.
- In php how do I do this function?
- How do I setup email filtering of spam?

With web hosting being as competitive as it is and website uptime as critical as it is to some sites, hosting companies have had to become excellent at customer support to survive. In any good hosting company, you should get an answer back quickly when you email the tech support team.

1. Calendar: If you are like my wife, you carry this little calendar around with all of your appointments, meetings, birthdays, vacations, and holidays in it. No one can see your hand written calendar but you, and if you lose it there is no recovering it. One of the pre-built applications included in almost all web hosting plans is a calendar. You can have a calendar online for everyone to see, and allow others to modify it if you want them to. You can print it out if needed, but now you don't have to worry about losing it.

The uses of a cheap hosting plan are well worth a few dollars a month!