Ten years ago, the amount of space that came with your hosting plan had to be paid very close attention to, since most plans didn’t come with much at all. Most webmasters were lucky to get as much as 50 megabytes of space, which by today’s standards wouldn’t have done much at all. But since then, the price of memory storage devices has gone down dramatically. In turn, web hosting companies started to provide access to larger disk space even with their most basic plans. But something else also happened.

It was realized that many people who didn’t know the ins and outs of web design programming could still benefit from having their own web page. Until this time, site design wizards were implemented to accommodate these types of customers. But the hosting companies didn’t have the time or budget to fully develop these programs, and the resulting websites looked rather, well, ugly.

When larger disk space became available, website “platforms” started to appear. These are programs like WordPress and vBulletin which utilize the large disk resources in order to give webmasters an interface for running their websites. The best way to describe the migration is that it’s similar to the change from text-based Operating Systems (like MS-DOS) to Graphical Ones (Windows). In essence, these platforms became the GUI’s for webmasters. Today, we refer to this as “Web 2.0”.

These Web 2.0 programs require more disk space to get up and running, they aren’t as insanely huge as most web hosting companies provide resources for. Even when taking advantage of these properties, the average website isn’t going to reach anywhere near 100 Gigabytes.

Forum Space Requirements:

For this example, we’ll discuss phpBB because it’s open source and an easy platform to start out with. Let’s start with setup. According to the popular phpBB discussion boards, the platform takes up a WHOPPING 10 megabytes when first installed. Most add-ons require around 1 megabyte. After that, you’ve got your themes, which, by the way, you can only use 1 of at a time. All that’s left is the posts themselves.

The actual posts can sometimes be hard to gauge. What you must first understand is the fact that the posts are stored in SQL databases. Some web hosts (usually the lesser-known ones) don’t even include this in your space quota, but may send you some unpleasant e-mails once your databases begin to explode. If it is measured with your disk space, then there’s the posts themselves to take account for, and then any attachments that go along with them.

If the average thread length is 2,000 words (aprox. 20 posts), then that’s about 10 kilobytes per thread. If over the next year you get…. say 3,000 threads (a good number for a new forum), it’l come out to about 30 megabytes (plus attachments). So for forums, a ridiculous amount of web space (+1GB) is not usually necessary.

Blog Space Requirements:

Blogs are similar to forums, but generally have less content. This is simply because there’s only one person writing the content to begin with, and that’s the webmaster. Now, of course there’s also the input given by the readers through commenting, but the discussions usually aren’t as direct so they don’t usually come out as lengthy.

So on the content end, Blogs have a lot less storage requirements. The thing about blogs though is they usually have a lot of images and other media included in them, and the themes are often times above and beyond what a forum would be. But to put things in perspective, let’s say that the blog owner created one new post per day for a year. Each post contained 3 300×300 images (typical) and a 5 minute video. If the image is stored as a Jpeg (not wise, but common among blog owners due to digital camera formatting), that’s around 120 kilobytes per post. The video will probably come out to 3 or 4 megabytes depending on quality, or it may come out to nothing and be stored on YouTube instead. So worse case scenario is about 5 megabytes per post. For someone making 1 post per day for a year, they’d need about 2 Gigs of space, which is still a lot less than most hosting companies offer in their basic plans.

So why offer all that disk space?

Large disk space usually only becomes necessary when not using these types of programs. Sites like cNet.com which provide review videos and downloads for nearly every program out there may require an absurd amount of space to function. Also, major corporations which not only use their web servers to communicate with customers, but also store company-related documents, databases, and html-based programs to interface with them may also require large disk space. But none of those requirements usually fit the average webmaster. Web space should probably not be much of a factor when worrying about what hosting plan to purchase.