How Much Space Does My Website Need? The Ins and Outs of Web Hosting

How Much Space Does My Website Need?
Before you start a website, you need to do your research. This does not only apply to the web hosting company. One must assess the needs of the website, their audience and the functionality needed. To estimate your website needs, make a budget and a list of what the website will need to do as well as the kind of content you wish to upload. During this time, you will come across the need to estimate how much space your website will need. Let us see how we can determine this.

Small Blog
For a small blog on average, about 250 MB will do. Keep in mind that you will have to accommodate for plugins and the theme you select. For a WordPress blog, a minimum of 100MB is required to operate properly. If you have a small audience, with less than 100 visitors per month a 5GB disk will be more than enough. This will also accommodate daily posting including images.

Images and text are a big part of the website space. Generally, five hundred pages will use about 1MB of space while pictures use up far more. As a rule of thumb, one picture is approximately 80KB in size, but it varies. For a website with multimedia content, this needs more space. Video and audio files take a lot of space and can come down to a few hundred MB every time you upload a quality video. If you want to be on the safe side estimate about 100GB for a website that contains multimedia, with a blog. If you will consider developing your website further in the future, 100-200GB should be sufficient.

Medium Blog
When it comes to a medium-sized blog with a relatively large following of about 1000 visitors per day, disk space on your laptop could grow to 15GB. Considering you are uploading content such as PDF files and have an archive of roughly 200 articles. 50 GB is sufficient bandwidth for a medium sized blog with regular visitors. This is for up to 200 per day.
Making estimations prior to buying web hosting packages is a good idea. Otherwise, it could get expensive fast and become a bad experience altogether.

Also see: What are the benefits of outsourcing your web hosting support?

Bigger Blogs
A blog or website needs years of content to get several thousand visitors per day. Remember the more plugins you include the more space you will need. For a big website, they often have multiple pages and this also requires more space. Such websites will need at least 30GB of disk space on their computer to accommodate such a website’s content.

The heavier the online traffic the more space you will need to accommodate your site. The bandwidth you need directly correlates to the amount of traffic flowing to your website. The ‘unlimited bandwidth’ offers are mostly ingenuine. All companies must pay for their data usage, therefore offering unlimited bandwidth means you will surely have a poor experience. This offer amounts to slow loading time and this is always bad for business.

As a beginner, start small and scale your website according to the growing demand. Unless you are sure that your website will need large amounts of bandwidth and disk space, use the recommended regulated space available. For example, each web page will need approximately 1-2 MB therefore, 150 MB of bandwidth should be able to accommodate this site comfortably. For each web page, do not go beyond 2MB per page. It will compromise loading speeds.