Determining a web hosting package with the right amount of resources, including RAM, CPU cores, and disk space is one of the most critical decisions you need to make when taking your business online
This disk space will store all your website’s dynamic content, files, and critical data. You can think of it as similar to the hard drive storage on your local computer machine. Unfortunately, many users overestimate or underestimate the disk space storage impacting their purchasing decisions.
In this article, we’ll guide you to determine the right amount of disk space for your website, so you don’t end up spending more and worrying about the negative impact of less disk space for your website. Let’s first quickly understand what disk space is.
What Does the Disk Space of a Website Mean?
The disk space of a website refers to the raw storage that your website has on a server. Server storage is pretty much identical to hard disk storage, USB storage, etc. It’s measured in GigaBytes (GB).
Different companies refer to server disk space as ‘storage’, ‘web storage’, ‘website storage’ etc., by different companies. However, they’re all essentially talking about simple, raw storage on the server’s hard disk.
What is Website Disk Space Used for in Web Hosting Plans?
When someone accesses your website, your web server will look for the relevant information and transfer it to the browser. So, all your website data that people access needs to be stored online. This includes your website layout, the logo, images, videos, all the additional content that you upload over time things like that. That’s one use.
However, you need storage for a few more reasons. For starters, there are applications that you use to run your website. PHP, CSS, CMS, JavaScript files, etc.. All these applications need to be stored on your webserver too. What’s more, CMS (WordPress, for example) applications usually have a lot of additional themes and whatnot that take up more storage.
Additionally, you’ll have databases that take up storage. Over time, you’ll also collect user information like email addresses, shipping addresses, etc., and you’ll have to store them on your web server. Finally, there are emails. Of course, all emails that you send and receive need to be stored. It’s your web server that stores them.
The concept to understand here is that your web server doesn’t store your website as your viewers see it. All the backend stuff sits on your server too.
How Much Disk Space Do I Need for my Website?
Unfortunately, there’s no straight answer to this. Each website is built differently, uses different applications, databases, and has different layouts. Therefore, the storage needs of each website are almost unique.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t estimate, with fair accuracy, the storage needs of your website. So, let’s look at how much storage your website could probably need.
Text-based websites with little content use the least amount of storage. On the other hand, images and videos take up a lot of space.
One WordPress installation, including all the plugins and directories, will usually take up to 1GB of storage. There are plenty of exceptions here, of course these are guesstimates.
So, if you’re running a blog where only you’re uploading content, and it’s just a few images and videos, then you don’t need a lot of storage. On the other hand, if your website will serve as your portfolio for your photography career, you’re going to need a lot of storage because of all the resource-rich media that you’ll be uploading.
We still don’t have a solid number for our storage needs with all this in the background. The next section will give you one.
How Hosting Companies Decide on Storage?
The best people who can estimate storage requirements are hosting companies. They provide storage for many websites and therefore know how much storage a website might require.
This is reflected in the plans that these companies offer. Often, storage packages start at 5GB, move upwards to 10GB, 25GB, 50GB, 100GB, and beyond. These numbers aren’t chosen because they’re round figures and easy to remember. There’s a lot of research that goes into these figures.
Each of these storage figures is paired with a certain hosting plan, and therefore, the company is, in some ways, hinting at how much storage you’ll need.
Here is how much storage you will most probably need for your website.
Storage Needs for Different Types of Websites
- If your website is mainly a static website with little content, a 5GB storage plan is more than enough. Personal blogs, small businesses taking online orders, etc., fall into this category. As your website grows, you can upgrade to a 10GB plan.
- E-commerce websites need a lot of storage. If you’re starting one, note that you’ll have to upload high-quality images of the products on your website. Video descriptions are getting more popular, and if you choose to implement them, you’re going to need even more storage. You’ll have to do this for multiple products, meaning that you’ll need a lot of storage.
Depending on the size of your catalog, you’re going to need anywhere between 25GB to 100GB+.
- Streaming services irrespective of audio or video will need a huge amount of storage over time. You’re uploading storage-rich content regularly, meaning that you’ll have a lot of media to manage over a while.
- Any publication website it doesn’t matter what you’re covering needs a lot of storage. Now, the content that you upload may not be ‘heavy’ in terms of videos or images. However, a publication website works on the principle of uploading lots of articles, blogs, and text. While the text doesn’t take up a lot of space, you’re bound to need a lot of storage over time.
Conclusion
While very easily overlooked, storage is a very important consideration when buying a web hosting plan. Lack of storage can not only be frustrating but can adversely impact your business.
However, the one good thing about storage needs is that hosting companies are usually quite good at pairing storage with hosting plans, and therefore you shouldn’t have a lot of problems as long as you partner with a good hosting company. With Cloud Hosting, you can easily scale your website resources, including disk space, as and when required without any downtime risks.
At Webzworld, we offer highly scalable and flexible SSD powered Cloud Hosting plans to our customers 99.9% uptime, 1-click RAM and CPU upgrade, and more. So, visit our website and choose an ideal Cloud Hosting plan to scale your business with ease.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to get in touch with us or leave a comment below!
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