How much disk space your website actually needs: sizing for blogs, shops and dashboards

Following our guide on RAM, we're closing the hosting resources series with disk space: the question that comes up most often from people managing a website without sysadmin experience is "how much space do I actually need?" The answer depends on site type, but there are verifiable scales of magnitude that help you avoid oversizing or, worse, running out of space mid-year.

Blog with 200 articles and images

A basic WordPress installation takes up very little space—typically less than 100 MB for core files, theme and essential plugins. The bulk of space comes from articles, database revisions and especially images.

For a blog with few pages, 1–3 GB of space is generally sufficient, provided you optimise images before uploading. If you publish regularly and use many high-resolution images, aim for 5 GB to have some breathing room.

There's a technical reason why images take up more space than expected: WordPress doesn't just save the original file, it automatically generates multiple versions at different dimensions to fit various layouts and devices. In one documented case, a 76 KB original image ended up taking 188 KB total after thumbnail generation—over 140% more space on disk than the original. Across 200 articles with unoptimised images, this multiplier adds up fast: install a compression plugin before uploading, not after.

WooCommerce shop with 1,000 products

E-commerce is the category that consumes the most disk, for several reasons: each product has multiple images (sometimes 5–10 per item), the database grows with orders, reviews and customer data, and you often add plugins for payments, shipping and marketing.

For medium-sized catalogues, the safety threshold is higher than for a blog: for an e-commerce shop with a medium catalogue (a few hundred products), it's prudent to start at 10 GB, whilst larger catalogues or high-traffic shops may need 20 GB or more. With 1,000 products and multiple photos per item, 10 GB is the realistic minimum, not the safety margin: if the catalogue also includes high-resolution product zoom images, it's wiser to start at 15–20 GB.

A general reference table, independent of WordPress, gives an idea of ranges by project type:

Site type	Average space
Portfolio of 5 pages, optimised images	300–500 MB
Company brochure website	500 MB – 2 GB
News portal or magazine	over 5 GB
E-commerce with large catalogue and order history	over 10 GB
Site with multimedia content (video/audio)	over 10–20 GB

Source: Portfolio site of 5 pages with optimised images 300–500 MB, company brochure website 500 MB–2 GB, e-commerce with large product catalogue, images and order history >10 GB, news portal or online magazine >5 GB, Shellrent, 29 October 2025.

Dashboard with attachments and local backups

Here disk grows for a different reason than images: documents, PDFs, email attachments and especially backups. If the dashboard saves backups to the same disk as the site (common but risky practice: if the server goes down, you lose both the site and copies), required space doubles compared to the dashboard alone. A database handling lots of data, comments, orders or user interactions grows less predictably than a media library of images, and it's the first thing to check when space runs out without obvious cause.

How to read disk usage from the control panel

On cPanel-based panels, look for "Disk Usage": the interface shows which files and directories consume the most disk space, helping you identify where consumption accumulates. A useful technical detail: the calculation includes MySQL and PostgreSQL database sizes in the total space used by the account, although the system won't block the account if it's the database that exceeds quota. Worth checking before looking elsewhere: sometimes it's not the images but the database, bloated by article revisions, logs or tables from poorly uninstalled plugins, eating up the space.

What "unlimited" space actually includes

On shared plans, the term "unlimited" doesn't mean absence of technical limits. There's almost always a fair use policy: providers impose practical restrictions despite the term suggesting otherwise. Specifically, the most common restrictions concern maximum file count (the so-called inode limit), allowed individual file size and content type: backups, multimedia archives or executable files are often not permitted in "unlimited" space intended for hosting a website.

In practice: unlimited space is designed for files that make up your published site (pages, images, scripts), not for storing backups, security copies or files not meant for online publication. Anyone using hosting space as a backup disk for company documents eventually gets a provider warning or performance slowdown, because the provider notices the usage doesn't match the plan's intended use.

When to upgrade your plan or use external storage

Two concrete signals tell you it's time to change plan:

• occupied space consistently exceeds 70–80% of assigned quota, even after optimising images and cleaning the database;
• automatic panel backups start failing or are incomplete due to lack of space, which in cPanel can happen precisely when the account is near quota.

For backups, the most cost-effective solution is rarely buying more disk on the same hosting, but moving them to dedicated external storage. Real pricing example: a 1 TB Hetzner Storage Box (BX11 model) costs €3.20/month plus VAT, with unlimited traffic and support for protocols like FTP, SFTP, rsync and Borg Backup, according to Hetzner's official price list. For a site generating 2–3 GB of compressed backups per week, 1 TB of external storage covers years of retention at significantly lower cost than upgrading your main hosting plan, and critically, keeps security copies off the server you're trying to protect—which is the entire point of having a backup.