Some examples

A personal blog

Let's say you have a personal web site, using the popular WordPress blogging system to host a small handful of static pages and then however many posts.  You will probably only have one active e-mail address, and unless your blog is very popular you won't need a huge amount of bandwidth either.  What will you need?

200-300MB of storage space should be ample, and will give you plenty of room to grow for several years, even taking into account keeping your e-mails on the server.  You will need PHP and MySQL though, so make sure your package has both.

Our Home package would be ideal!

A reasonable sized company web site

For something more comprehensive, a more substantial CMS would be required to manage a greater number of pages.  It's likely that you'll want the option for more functionality too, like a discussion forum, image galleries, even podcasts.  You may also be providing e-mail accounts for several people in the business.

To give you enough space for growth to cover you for years to come, you would be well advised to look for something with at least 500MB of space, possibly 1GB if you plan on providing much in the way of multimedia (photos, videos, podcasts, etc) or exchanging a lot of e-mails.  PHP and MySQL will be essential, plus support from your host to help you set everything up properly.

If this is what you're looking for, our Premium package might be right up your street!

How much web space do I need?

Take a look around on the net and you'll find an almost limitless number of web hosting packages, all offering different amounts of web space, bandwidth, additional functionality and quality of service.  How do you know what's right for you?  While we cannot hope to answer all your questions in one go, this article aims to explain just what you do need from a hosting package, and what you don't.

What uses up storage space?

HTML files

Basic HTML files are essentially just text, and in that sense they take up hardly any room at all.  A web site with, say, 20 HTML pages will take up very little room.  In fact, aside from images, a site like that would probably quite happily fit on a floppy disk.  So your HTML files are nothing to worry about.

Server-side code - PHP, SSI, ASP, etc.

If you are using any of these web programming languages you may find that the amount of space you need will go up slightly.  But only slightly.  Take for instance a fully-featured content management system like MODx, Joomla or even WordPress - a fresh install of one of those will only take up a few megabytes, and even with lots of pages and fancy templates it still won't make a massive dent on your storage space.

To put this into some meaningful context, this site (as of October 2008) takes up a whopping 25MB.  A fairly small WordPress site I'm currently working on is taking up 15MB.  I also work on a much larger web site that uses a CMS, has 800+ pages, a massive database of contact information, a busy news area, lots of multimedia and uses a fairly substantial 20GB of bandwidth every month; that site currently takes up around 600MB.

So think carefully about how big your site is going to get, and what's going to be in it, and ask yourself whether you really need a web hosting package that offers several gigabytes of storage space.  You'll be surprised how little you may end up actually needing for your web site.

Databases

If you are using a Content Management System, forum software, image gallery or anything that needs to record information that is likely to change regularly, it is likely that you'll need a database of some description.  Does a database take up lots of storage space?  Again, taking this web site as an example, the database is currently sitting at just over 1MB.  On the big web site I mentioned earlier that has 800+ pages and a custom-built contacts database, the database takes up 230MB, of which 8MB is the site's content and around 120MB is system logs from the past few years that could quite easily be deleted.

So database storage is a consideration if you are planning anything big, but for a small site like this one it's not likely to be a major consideration.

Multimedia

This is where the numbers begin to get a bit bigger.  While an HTML file may only take up a few KB, a photo taken straight off a digital camera can by as much as 3MB (depending on the quality of the camera).  If you're planning on putting lots of photos online in maximum resolution, you're going to need to make sure you've got enough storage space for it all.  However, if all you want to do is put a few pictures on a web page, you don't need the images to be anywhere near as high quality or as large in size.  My normal recommendation is that inline photos (i.e. when you have a photo and some text on a page, like a news article) should be 300 pixels on their longest side; a landscape photo in normal 3:2 ratio would therefore be 300x200 pixels, and even with a generous level of JPG quality (i.e. not compressed too much) it can still come in at around 100KB.  The savings you'll make are quite clear.

Video and audio are further considerations, since they take up even more disk space.  So if you're planning on hosting podcasts or sharing video clips, a web hosting package with a reasonable amount of storage space is probably going to be a good idea.

E-mails

This is something many people forget is included in their web package's storage space.  If you are a light user it may not figure too highly, but if you are regularly receiving large attachments or large quantities of mail and leaving the messages on the server then this can start to have a big impact on your available web space.  I recently discovered that my e-mails from the last couple of years took up just over 1GB!

However, this is unlikely to be an issue for most people, simply because the usual setup for collecting e-mails is using POP3, downloading the message to your computer rather than leaving a copy on the server.  If you have that setup, there's nothing to worry about.  However, if you are using IMAP or relying on webmail to view your e-mails, it may be something to consider in your calculations.