How much storage does my website need?
By Ash, Founder, HosteazePublished 2 min read
The short answer
A typical small business website needs somewhere between 1 and 5 GB of storage. WordPress itself takes about 110 MB, and the rest is your images, plugins, database, email and any backups kept on the server. Email and old backups are the usual reasons a site outgrows its plan, not the pages themselves.
Storage is the easiest hosting number to overbuy. Sales pages love big figures, but a typical small business site with a few dozen pages and a gallery fits comfortably in a few gigabytes. What fills a plan isn't usually the website at all; it's everything that piles up around it.
What takes up space on a hosting account?
| Item | Rough size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress itself | About 110 MB | WordPress 7.1.3, unzipped, as of October 2026 |
| Theme and plugins | 20 to 200 MB | Page builders and big plugins are the heavy ones |
| Database | 5 to 100 MB | Grows with posts, orders and logs |
| Images and media | 100 MB to several GB | WordPress also saves resized copies of each upload |
| 0 to many GB | Every message and attachment counts if mail is on your hosting | |
| Backups stored on the server | A full copy of the site each time | Easy to forget and the fastest way to fill a plan |
How do I estimate my storage needs?
- Start with about 0.5 GB for WordPress, a theme and a typical set of plugins.
- Estimate your images: number of photos multiplied by their size. 500 photos at 300 KB each is about 150 MB, before WordPress's resized copies.
- Add email: count your mailboxes and estimate how much each person keeps. A single 20 MB attachment, close to Gmail's 25 MB sending limit, sitting in five inboxes uses 100 MB.
- Add a margin of at least 50% for growth.
A salon with ten pages, a 200-photo gallery and three mailboxes might land around 2 to 3 GB. A shop with thousands of product images will need more.
Why does file count matter as well as size?
Many hosts limit the number of files as well as the space they take, through an inode limit. WordPress alone is over 4,000 files, and on most mail servers each email is stored as its own file. A mailbox with 30,000 old messages can matter more than a 1 GB video.
How can I reduce my storage use?
- Resize and compress images before uploading. Our guide to optimising images for the web shows how.
- Delete old backups from the server once you've downloaded them.
- Ask staff to empty Trash and Sent folders and archive old mail.
- Remove unused themes and plugins.
- Host videos on YouTube or Vimeo rather than uploading them.
Storage and data transfer are different limits, so read how much bandwidth you need too. If you're new to it all, our house advice holds: start small and upgrade as you grow. What web hosting is covers the basics.
Frequently asked questions
Is unlimited storage really unlimited?
Not in practice. Unlimited plans normally come with a fair use policy and often an inode limit, which caps the number of files. They're fine for normal websites but not for using your hosting as a file store.
Does NVMe storage matter?
For speed, yes. NVMe SSDs read and write data much faster than older drives, which helps database-heavy sites like WordPress respond quickly. It doesn't change how much space you need.
What happens if I run out of storage?
Uploads fail, updates can break halfway, backups stop and, if email shares the space, new mail may bounce. Most control panels warn you as you get close, so act on those warnings.
