What a hosting storage limit actually measures

Almost every shared hosting plan you look at advertises a storage figure, and almost none of them explain what that figure is measuring. The number is real, but the thing it counts is usually not the thing you pictured, and the gap between the two is where the disappointment lives.

This is not an accusation. It is a definition problem, and once you know what to ask, the plans are easy to compare.

What actually fills a hosting account

Ask people what uses their space and most will say the website, which is broadly right. But a hosting account usually holds more than the site, and on many plans the other things are what actually fills the allowance. That is worth understanding, because it decides whether a storage figure means what you think it means.

Consider what else commonly lives in an account.

• Email. Mailboxes, and everything ever sent to them. A single mailbox that has been in use for years, with attachments, can be larger than the website it belongs to. This is the big one, and on many plans it is the reason an account has a storage problem at all.
• Backups. A backup is a copy of everything, which means it is as large as everything, and stacks of them are larger still.
• Databases. Usually small, occasionally enormous, and almost always invisible in a file manager because the files are not in your home directory.
• Logs. Access and error logs grow quietly and are rarely cleaned up.
• Whatever you forgot. The site you started building in 2019, the plugin folder from before the redesign, the export file you made once.

A website itself is normally a modest thing. Template files, a theme, a handful of plugins, and images. The images are usually the largest part, and they are the part a competent build compresses. A small business site that has been sensibly built is measured in tens or hundreds of megabytes, not gigabytes.

Why 20 GB is not 20 GB of website

So when a plan offers 20 GB, the honest reading is that it offers 20 GB across everything the account does. If email is in that number, and backups are in that number, then the space available to your actual website is whatever is left after both, and both grow on their own.

That is how an account ends up full while the website is tiny. Nobody uploaded 20 GB of site. The mail accumulated, and the backups multiplied, and the two of them used the allowance that the website was advertised as having.

It is worth asking any host one question before you buy. What exactly counts against this figure? A plan that answers that clearly is a plan you can size properly, whichever way the answer goes.

How it works here

We publish small storage figures, which invites the obvious question. The answer is that ours measures less than the usual number does.

Mail is not counted against your website storage. If you take mailboxes through us, they are provided as their own service on their own infrastructure and they do not consume the plan's website allowance. A mailbox full of years of attachments will not take a byte from your site.

Backups are not counted either. Backups are held separately from the website they protect, so keeping thirty days of them does not shrink the space your site has to work in. The plan states how many days of history you get, and that is a retention policy rather than a slice of your allowance.

What the figure does measure is your application, its files and its content. Which means a 1 GB plan is 1 GB of website, not 1 GB minus mail minus backups minus whatever else the account happens to be doing.

That is why we can publish 1 GB on a free plan without it being stingy. The comparison is not between our 1 GB and somebody else's 20 GB. It is between 1 GB of website and 20 GB shared with everything else, and depending on how the other plan counts, ours can be the larger of the two in practice.

What to ask instead of what to look for

The advertised number tells you very little on its own. These four questions tell you almost everything.

1. What counts against the quota? Website only, or mail and backups too.
2. Is the quota enforced? A limit that is not enforced is a number rather than a limit, and a site that quietly exceeds it will be asked to move later.
3. What happens at the limit? Whether the site stops being able to write files, or you are warned and given time.
4. Can storage be added without changing plan? Sometimes a small increase is a smaller job than a migration.

Our own answers are the ones above. The quota measures the website, it is enforced as a real limit, a site that fills it can stop being able to write and the fix is to move up a plan, and the plans are sized accordingly.

Why image-heavy sites get so large

It is worth knowing how quickly that happens, because the answer is usually not what people assume. We took apart one real image-heavy site to see where its space had gone. It held 2.5 GB of images across roughly 15,000 files, generated from only about 1,900 originals. Here is where that space had gone.

• 1.5 GB was originals. Real photographs, at full size. Several of the individual files were 20 to 25 MB each.
• About 730 MB was WordPress's own resized copies. Every image you upload is automatically re-rendered at several sizes for use in different places on the page, and every one of those copies is stored.
• About 360 MB was duplicate copies that a plugin had made of those resized versions.
• About 170 MB was WebP conversions, sitting alongside the originals they were converted from.

So a little over a fifth of that site's storage was not content at all. It was the same pictures, over and over, in slightly different forms. Each WordPress size was stored up to three times, once as generated, once as the plugin's copy, and once as the WebP version.

That is worth knowing before you buy storage to solve it, because the duplication is usually fixable and the files can simply be tidied. If you have a site that has been running for a while and its storage is far larger than the pictures on it should account for, this is the first thing to check.

What actually helps

Two habits account for most of the difference between a site that fits comfortably and one that does not, and neither is about the hosting.

Resize before you upload. A 25 MB photograph straight out of a camera becomes a 200 KB image on the page, because a browser is going to display it at a fraction of that size anyway. Uploading the full-size file means storing something nothing will ever serve. Resizing to around 2000 pixels on the longest edge, before the file is uploaded, is enough for almost any use and typically reduces an image by more than ninety percent.

Do not keep what nothing uses. Plugins and optimization routines often leave their working files behind, including backups of generated sizes, originals kept beside conversions, and older versions of images that were replaced. These are safe to clear once you are satisfied with the site, and they are frequently the largest single reclaimable chunk.

Neither of these needs a hosting change, a feature or a support ticket. They are the difference between a site that outgrows its plan and one that never comes close.

It is worth asking any host one question before you buy. What exactly counts against this figure? A plan that answers that clearly is a plan you can size properly, whichever way the answer goes.

Choosing the right size

Sizing is easier once you know what is being counted.

It helps to know what the numbers actually look like. WordPress itself is about 65 MB before you add anything, and most of that is the bundled editor, script libraries and translations rather than anything you will touch.

Beyond that, the figures from real small business sites are more modest than people expect, and the makeup is not what they expect either. Across several we look after, a finished brochure or service site lands between about 100 and 250 MB. In most of those cases the images were negligible and the bulk was the theme and plugins, which surprises people who assume photographs are what fills a hosting account. One of them carries under a megabyte of images and is still over 100 MB.

The exception proves the point. A genuinely image-heavy site, one with a large photo library or a product catalog with real photography, reaches several gigabytes on its own, and there the images are almost all of it. So the question is not how big your site is, it is whether you are hosting a lot of pictures.

It is also worth knowing that a site grows without anybody doing anything to it. WordPress, your theme and your plugins all get bigger with updates, and nothing tells you when that happens. A site that sat comfortably in a plan two years ago can be pressing against its ceiling now through maintenance alone.

• A new site, a brochure site, a personal project. A single gigabyte fits one properly, with room to grow. What eventually fills it is not the site you launch but what you keep adding, so it is the right size for starting rather than a ceiling you should expect to stay under forever.
• A growing business site, a blog with a back catalog of images. Five gigabytes gives comfortable room, and images are the thing to watch. This is the step most sites take first, and it is the one to size for if you expect to add pages, products or photographs. If you resize before uploading, described above, this tier lasts a long time.
• A store, or several sites on one account. Ten gigabytes and up. Product photographs are heavy and a catalog grows, so this is the category where storage stops being theoretical. Several sites on one account also means several sets of images, which is what makes this different from one busy site. Even here, it is worth checking for leftover plugin files before buying more room, because a store generates a great many image sizes.

If you are near a boundary, the question is not how much space you have today but how fast the thing filling it grows. Images and product catalogs grow steadily. A brochure site that is finished does not grow at all.

You can see how the three plans are sized on the shared hosting page, and if you would rather start with the domain and add hosting afterwards, the domain name catalog is where that begins.