The other day I was checking Hostinger‘s plans and noticed that on the cheapest plan they give you 100 GB of bandwidth.

Why Hostinger? I’ve read an excellent review about them and they look a well designed and all-around performant service.

I know a lot of people think “I need web hosting. However, how much web space do I need?

It depends mainly on the amount and the type of information you are going to store.

If you want to host a blog, a wiki, or even a forum where the information is mainly textual you will fit perfectly in 1 GB (1024 MB) of disk storage and even less.

Most of the static websites need around 5 – 50 MB that is mainly used by the graphics used with the design. Once again if you add mainly textual information, even a tiny amount of disk space is enough for most of the websites.

Just consider that in 1 MB you may store at least 524288 UTF-8 encoded characters of text (letters) which is equal approximately to a 300 pages book. Having 1 GB of disk space means you may store a library of 1000 books, and that is quite a lot.

Now about images. To be compact, and still high quality most of the images are using JPEG compression. That makes it possible to store a single High Definition image in about 0.5 – 2 MB. Note that a 2 MB or more is not something usually used within the web pages.

Even if you have a website with HD image gallery you will probably stick with image sizes smaller than 1 MB which makes you possible to store more than 1000 high-quality images in 1 GB. For a large image gallery web site you may want to choose a web hosting offering around 10 – 50 GB of disk space.

That will allow you to store about 10,000 – 50,000 and even more high-quality pictures.

Hosting Manual has a nice article about this as well and they came to the same conclusion.

Having high demand needs, storing large ZIP or ISO archives, streaming video files or high-quality audio files, or hosting a large number of websites in a single account may require a bit more. Something between 100 GB of disk space should be sufficient.

Everything above those numbers goes out of a typical web hosting scenario. In these cases, you may want to get a VPS, rent a dedicated server or buy CDN service.