Wondering if there is any real web hosting that offers enough resources for blogs and sites? So, here are the answers you searched for. We’ll show you how much disk space and bandwidth you need for a website and what the best web hosts are.
In reality, you can have unlimited bandwidth and also disk storage for your website when you host with one of the best companies we recommend, such as WP Engine, for site owners who need the best managed super-fast web hosting for WordPress with a minimum of 10 GB of storage that allows you to host a site with thousands of pages (see below to understand that).
It’s a Texas-based company rated the best in WordPress hosting and customer support with in-house technicians. Also, there are 3 months free on annual plans and 10 premium StudioPress themes for free.
On the other side, if you look for cheaper web hosting with enough disk storage and bandwidth, then use HostGator. However, in many cases, it’s better to estimate how much webspace and how many resources your website really needs.
Average disk space you need for a website
The disk space is the amount of data that your web hosting provider allows for each account. So, if you have a website with thousands of photos and media files, then, the disk space your website needs is the actual size of all these files combined. That includes the page with its HTML code, CSS, and everything else that a website needs to work.
In general, HTML and text will use the fewest disk spaces. On the other side, photos take up the biggest portion of storage. If we take into consideration that an average web page size with text and photos that are compressed takes 2000 KB of storage,. That’s 2 MB of server space for just one page and no more.
The growth of web animation, media innovations, and social media directly affected the average web page size, which keeps increasing each year.
That’s because of the need for JavaScript, CSS, and videos. So, if a website needed 5 GB of disk storage in the last few years, now it will need at least 10 GB of web space.
If a website stores lots of images, plugins, or tools, then go for 10 GB of disk storage at least. That will help you avoid server speed issues because of the full storage space.
Example for WordPress
Don’t neglect the web hosting space that your site’s software and tools use. Thus, for WordPress, for example, 20 MB of the storage will be used just for WordPress core files. And if you add the plugins, themes, and other files, the size can go higher and reach 5GB easily.
For that reason, if you have just 50 photos uploaded in WordPress, expect to have at least a few hundred, if not thousands, of images. That depends on your theme layout, features, and the different page settings for mobile, tablets, and desktop. That means if you have a new blog and you just started with only 20 megabytes of storage for images, then, that could be 120 megabytes of storage just because of the different sizes of each photo.
Add to that the text, theme files, and plugins the site uses. So, you’ll end up with more disk space needed to run the site smoothly. That’s why going with a generous disk space web host is always the best way.
How much is 10GB of storage?
To show you if 10 GB of storage is enough for a website or not, here is a real example of a website I own. First, it’s a site with over 400 long-form articles with images and sometimes videos (hosted on Youtube, of course). So, the actual site size is 3.5 GB, including all the images, plugins, theme, and database.
Now, if you multiply the number of pages by three, you’ll find 400* 3 = 1200 pages. Thus, 3.5 GB * 3 = 10.5 GB. As a result, 10 GB of disk space can host a website with one thousand pages easily.
If you have a website on WordPress, for example, that sells thousands of products and has like 2000 pages, then you need 20GB of SSD hosting space. That’s because SSDs work faster than old HDD servers.
50 GB of SSD storage is enough for a website or blog with 5000 pages, which is also the case for forums or eCommerce sites with lots of content. And because SSDs is fast, there should be no issues with speed if you choose a quality web host.
On the other hand, the human visit is the number of unique IP addresses that visit the site over a period of 24 hours. That means if one person comes to your site dozens of times a day, that only counts as a unique visit, so 1.
Monthly bandwidth your website needs
What is bandwidth in web hosting?
For site bandwidth usage, your web hosting provider will count the number of data transfers that the server transfers for web browsers. In other words, when someone visits a web page, he will get page files like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even PHP transferred directly from the server.
So, the website bandwidth usage depends on the number of visits your website gets. The more popular a website is, the more bandwidth it will need. However, we can estimate that, on average, some 20GB of bandwidth will be enough for a small website.
If you have lots of data and your site receives good traffic, like 5000 visits per day, then it will need more. In this case, 50 GB of monthly transfer should be sufficient.
How to save more website bandwidth?
Of course, if you have a CDN service, then the image bandwidth will not be added here. But you can also decrease the bandwidth used by compressing your website files.
There is a great tool in cPanel called website optimizer or something similar that does the job. The software reduces the size of your site files and makes everything faster, which saves a lot of bandwidth.
For images, make sure you upload compressed images to your server. There are lots of apps that can do that for you. In addition, we recommend limiting the maximum image width a webpage on your blog can serve. For example, if the maximum page content width is 900 PX, then why should you upload bigger image sizes?
You see? When you upload images without wasting the width of a webpage, you’ll save more gigabytes in the long term on disk storage. In the end, you’ll speed up your blog and make everything better for your website’s users.
What is unmetered bandwidth?
Some web hosting providers, like Bluehost, offer unmetered website bandwidth each month. That means that your web hosting account bill is not linked to the amount of data that the site transfers.
In other words, it’s not counted, so you can use as much as you can, but without affecting the server’s usage, of course.
So, unmetered bandwidth means you don’t have to worry about bandwidth unless you have a huge amount of traffic each month.
In that case, the web hosting provider will contact you to upgrade to a higher level of service, like a VPS or even dedicated hosting. That’s a suitable hosting solution for high traffic websites. The first provider on this page is the best host for news websites because it’s super fast, even with thousands of pages and daily posts.
What is unmetered disk space?
The same as above, unmetered disk space usage means you’re not billed for the amount of server storage space your website uses. In 99% of cases, users will not cause any problems to the server storage unless they have a huge number of files. So, don’t worry about the disk space of your company providing unmetered or unlimited storage.
In many cases, you’ll find limited storage on SSD hosting. In this case, don’t be confused; SSD is much faster and better. That means, limited SSD disk space is a good sign of a quality web hosting service.
Web hosts with unlimited server space and bandwidth
We tried different web hosts, tested their servers’ speeds, and compared things together. What worked very well for all kinds of websites without worrying about speed, bandwidth, or storage were the following web hosts:
1. HostGator
HostGator is a quality web hosting provider that offers unlimited disk space and unlimited server space for your website. In addition, there is a free domain, lots of options, and installer software. We recommend this hosting in the first place, and we give it 9.5/10 of a score.
2. Bluehost
Bluehost is the second option for unlimited disk storage and monthly transfer web hosting. There are lots of apps to install and manage your website like a pro, without limitations on server resource usage.
Best of all, there is a good website builder tool with drag-and-drop. So, you can build your website and use as much disk space as you need without problems. We give 8/10 of the score for this hosting service.
Why is bandwidth important for a website?
It’s highly recommended to estimate the monthly bandwidth your website needs. That will let you choose the right web hosting plan and save money at the same time. So, before even thinking about hosting packages, the monthly bandwidth limits, and specifications, understand your blog or website bandwidth usage. Then, estimate the number of visits per day, and per month.
Now, the website bandwidth is important because you don’t want to exceed the monthly quota that your web hosting provider configured for your plan. So, when your website consumes all the allocated monthly bandwidth, the site will go down. After that, visitors who want to access a page will see a warning telling them your site is out of bandwidth. Consequently, that could decrease the site’s reputation, and that’s not good for your site’s trust or business in general.
When someone is unable to see your page and your hosting provider shows a warning about bandwidth limitations, he’ll see your business as not as serious as he expects. In reality, if you run a useful website, you should also think about limitations. So, allocate more bandwidth and even disk storage to avoid downtime.
On the other side, you should never worry about website bandwidth limitations if your site is new and has little content. So, if you have a few hundred visits per day as a maximum, you’ll have good monthly site bandwidth usage.
Final advice on website bandwidth and disk space needs
There are many web hosts, but HostGator is what works best in terms of site speed, bandwidth, and disk space. There is unmetered bandwidth for your site, and you have no problems with server disk space as it’s also unmetered.
It means you can host any type of website and make it work as fast as possible. And if you have a really big website with thousands of visits every day, then, choose their VPS or dedicated server plans; it’s the best hosting for high-traffic websites.
Now, we hope you learned how much disk space and bandwidth your blog or website needs in reality. Remember that only the real usage of your website can give you accurate estimations.
Thus, if 20 GB of storage is enough for a blog, that can not be enough for another blog with thousands of HD images.
FAQ about site bandwidth, disk space, and resources
What is the bandwidth for a website?
Web hosting bandwidth is the amount of data transferred between the web servers and the browser or computer, and it’s calculated per month. An example of website bandwidth usage is when someone visits any page using a web browser like Google Chrome or others.
So, when the user or visitor sees your website page(s), Google Chrome will send requests to the server asking it to serve specific information, images, or other details. That’s the data transferred from the web browser to the saver.
Next, the web server executes the web browser requests and shows the right content that the user asked for. For example, your “about us” page. That’s also outbound data sent from the web server ( your hosting account) to the web browser, which is Google Chrome or Safari.
Example: When someone clicks a link to your homepage, he’ll download your full homepage content size, let’s say 200 KB. And that’s only the outbound bandwidth. So, the more you compress your site’s content, the more hosting bandwidth you’ll save.
Web hosting providers reset the bandwidth usage for users on the first day of every month. That’s web hosting services that calculate the website’s bandwidth usage monthly.
For that, if your web host offers 100 GB of bandwidth, then it’s enough for most small to medium-sized websites.
How much memory does a website need?
A small site or blog that has 500 to 1000 visits per day will need 512 MB of memory to work normally. But if you want it to be as fast as possible, choose 1 GB of memory. It will be much better for your site’s speed. For high-traffic platforms like news websites or blogs, choose a minimum of 4GB of server RAM, that’s better.
How much bandwidth do I need for my website?
When hosting a static website with a few visits per day, you should not worry about bandwidth. Generally, any hosting plan will be sufficient. On the other hand, for a WordPress site or medium-sized blog, 5GB to 10 GB of bandwidth will be enough per month.
So, 1 GB of bandwidth is enough for your website in most cases, unless you have a tiny static site with only a few pages. Or the site will be so slow and without any value in terms of speed.
How many GB of storage does a website need?
Most WordPress websites need less than 5 GB of disk storage, and that’s enough. However, think about your images, and how many of them you’ll add per page. So, if you have a website of 30 pages, and you have images, text, CSS, HTML, etc., then 2 MB is what you can expect as a single page size.
That’s the stats of page size for different resources like Pingdom and HTTP Archive. Nevertheless, the page size of websites keeps increasing year after year. And 3 MB is the actual average size of a web page that multiple tools have analyzed.
If we want to calculate the disk space you need for a website,. Then, do math: 30 pages multiplied by 3 MB each. The result is 90 MB in total. Still, we should add extra disk space for WordPress core files or any CMS (20 MB on average). So, 130 MB of disk space is what we need for a website of 30 pages, including images and other types of files.
So, by calculating the server space we needed for a simple website, let’s scale the stats to different levels of sites and blogs:
- A 100-page website needs 350 MB of disk storage
- A blog with 300 posts or pages needs 1GB of disk storage as a minimum
- A website with 1000 pages needs 5 GB of disk space on average (better to work, choose SSD for large site storage).
How much SSD storage do I need?
SSD storage is super fast on web servers. So, it’s an advantage to hosting sites on SSDs. Even more, the server’s memory accesses the resources of the pages, like HTML and images, much faster. So, if the web host offers SSD plans, then, expect it to be a little smaller in terms of size compared to an old version of HDD. That’s because most SSD servers include image optimization software.
That drastically reduces the size of the file without affecting the quality. Keep in mind that the WordPress storage limit is 3 GB on their platforms. So, if you see 10 GB of SSD, or even 5, that would be good for blogs and small sites.
Is 10 GB bandwidth enough for a website?
The short answer is yes, 10 GB of monthly bandwidth is enough for small- to medium traffic blogs and sites. But don’t forget to protect the site against Hotlink. Or choose a fully managed web hosting plan like the above solutions.
It’s what can consume all your site bandwidth when a spammer adds your images to his website in order to sever them from your servers and not from his account. But the good news is that the majority of web hosting providers have that option in cPanel. With one click, you can enable hotlink protection and save your hosting bandwidth from being abused by spammers.
Can a website bandwidth calculator help?
Whenever you see a tool called a website bandwidth calculator on any web host, just don’t count on it. Here is how calculating the average monthly bandwidth and disk space usage for your site based on that won’t help.
First, most web hosts in the US offer enough bandwidth and disk storage. So, there is no need to estimate the usage of these resources unless you have a high traffic site or eCommerce web store with thousands of products and photos.
If that’s the case, then simply contact the customer support of your best web hosting company and ask them if 10 GB of storage is enough for your website or not. But even with that, it won’t be accurate to calculate the monthly site resources you need. So, first, have a clear idea of your website pages. Then, simply take one page of your site and try to use it as an example of all the other pages.
After that, see how many images you have on that page and tell the web host if you want to use Facebook marketing or not. That’s essential because you’re the only one who can estimate the number of visits. After that, make sure the web hosting service offers scalable plans. So, when your site needs more disk storage and bandwidth, you can easily scale it with a few clicks.
