How much disk space do you actually need?
For an ordinary business site or blog the smallest hosting plan is almost always enough: most of those sites stay under one gigabyte. What takes up space is not your text but your images, the backups you leave on the hosting yourself and, above all, your mailboxes. Add up the site, the database and the mailboxes, add half again for growth, and you know which plan you need. The plans are listed on hosting pricing.
What counts towards your disk space
- The files of the site. The CMS itself, the theme and the plugins. A fresh WordPress installation weighs a few dozen megabytes; with a page builder and a set of plugins that quickly becomes a few hundred.
- The media. Images, PDF files and video. For almost every site this is the largest part.
- The database. Your text, settings, orders and comments. Usually a few dozen megabytes, more for a busy webshop. Whether the database counts towards the disk space or has a limit of its own differs from one provider to the next.
- The mailboxes. All the mail that stays on the server, attachments included, and that covers the folders with sent and deleted messages too.
- Everything that grows around it. Log files, cache folders, backups that a plugin stores on the hosting itself, and old copies of the site.
How to estimate your usage
If you already have a site, measure instead of guessing.
- Open the control panel of your current hosting and look for the disk usage overview. It shows the total, and usually also the split between website, databases and mail.
- If you only see a total, check how large the folders are in the file manager or over FTP. With WordPress that is mainly the wp-content/uploads folder.
- Check in phpMyAdmin how large the database is: the size is shown per table and as a total at the bottom.
- Add up the mailboxes. The size of each mailbox is shown in the control panel or in the webmail.
- Add half again for the growth of the coming years.
If you do not have a site yet, work it out like this. A photo that has been resized for the web weighs 100 to 300 kilobytes. WordPress automatically creates a few smaller versions of every upload, so allow for roughly double per image. Five hundred photos then come to 100 to 300 megabytes. A photo straight from a phone or camera weighs 3 to 8 megabytes: easily twenty times as much. The difference between a small and a large plan therefore comes down almost entirely to how you prepare your images. How to go about that is explained in optimising images.
What eats up space without you noticing
- Backups on the hosting itself. A backup plugin that puts a full copy in a folder on the site every week doubles your usage within a few weeks. Have the plugin keep only a couple of copies, or store them elsewhere.
- Old copies. A folder with the previous version of the site, a test environment from two years ago, a zip file from a migration.
- Log files. The error log of a plugin that writes a warning on every visit can grow to hundreds of megabytes.
- Mail. Anyone who works over IMAP and never tidies up will, after a few years, use more space for mail than for the website. See my mailbox is full.
What happens when the space runs out
You do not notice a full hosting account from a slow site, but from things that suddenly stop working: uploading an image fails, an update gets stuck halfway, mailboxes refuse new messages. What to do first is covered in my hosting is full: what now.
When a larger plan makes sense
If you are still above eighty per cent of your space after tidying up, or your usage grows every month because of new products, photos or mail, go one size up. Do not look at the megabytes alone. A larger plan generally also comes with more PHP memory, and with page builders and webshops that is more often the real limit than the disk space. A site that throws memory errors is not fixed with more disk space.
When a VPS makes sense
Rarely for the space alone. A VPS starts to make sense when you need tens of gigabytes, for instance for a large archive of images or documents, or when you need your own software or dedicated memory on top of the space. With a managed VPS you choose the memory and the storage yourself. The difference from shared hosting is explained on what is a VPS.
Frequently asked questions
Is disk space the same as data traffic?
No. Disk space is what sits on the server. Data traffic is what visitors request each month. A small site with many visitors needs little space and a lot of traffic.
How much space does a webshop need?
That depends on the number of product photos, not on the number of products. Allow 200 to 600 kilobytes per photo, resized versions included. A thousand products with three photos each then come to 0.6 to 1.8 gigabytes.
How do I see how much space I am using now?
In the control panel of your hosting. At WWW4 you open that panel from the customer portal. Look at it a few times a year and you will see the growth coming rather than the error message.
Still stuck?
Not sure which plan suits your site? Send us your domain name and what you have in mind via contact, and we will tell you what is enough.