When choosing a hosting plan, there are two figures worth paying attention to: storage, which is the combined size of files, databases and emails; and monthly traffic (often referred to colloquially as ‘bandwidth’), i.e. the amount of data downloaded by visitors in a month. Requirements vary from website to website, but can be estimated fairly accurately based on a few factors.

Guidance on dimensions by website type

The figures below are approximate and not guaranteed. The actual size of a website depends largely on the number and size of the images uploaded.

Website type	Typical storage requirements
An introductory page with a few subpages (HTML or a simple CMS)	a few tens to a few hundred MB
Fresh WordPress installation with a theme and a few plugins	approx. 100–300 MB
A blog that has been running for several years	1–5 GB
Online shop with a few hundred to a few thousand products	2–10 GB or more
Business email	From a few hundred MB to several GB per mailbox

What causes the size to increase?

• Images: WordPress creates several smaller versions of every image uploaded, meaning that a single image takes up several times the space of the original uploaded file on the hosting server. Before uploading, it is advisable to resize the images to the display size and compress them.
• Database: the size of the database increases with the number of entries, products, orders and comments; over time, an online shop’s database can grow to several hundred MB.
• Emails: email storage is also deducted from the storage quota, and due to attachments, it often grows faster than the website itself.
• Your own backups and log files: backup archives and old log files left on your hosting account also take up space.

How much traffic do I need?

Monthly traffic is roughly equal to the number of page views multiplied by the size of a single page. For example, if a page, including images, is 2 MB and there are 10,000 page views per month, this amounts to approximately 20 GB of monthly traffic. The browser caches style sheets and images, so returning visitors download less data. However, large downloadable files (videos, PDFs, installation packages) can quickly increase data usage.

Which plan is right for me?

• Our web hosting plans: the free ‘Web Free’ plan offers 1 GB of storage and 100 GB of monthly traffic, whilst the paid plans are available with hosting ranging from 5 GB to 200 GB and unlimited traffic.
• Our cPanel hosting plans offer hosting ranging from 2 GB to 100 GB with unlimited traffic; processor, memory and I/O limits also come into play here, so for a high-traffic online shop, it is worth taking these into account alongside the storage space.

If you are unsure, choose a plan that is at least 30–50 per cent larger than your estimated requirements to allow for future growth. You can upgrade to a larger plan at any time later on; your data will be retained.

How can you check your current usage?

• Web hosting (KeyHelp): on the dashboard page, you can view the storage used and traffic compared to your plan’s allowance.
• cPanel hosting: in the statistics bar on the right-hand side and in the Disk Usage tool, you can view what is taking up space on a folder-by-folder basis (checking disk usage in cPanel).
• If you are switching from another provider: your old hosting control panel will also show your disk usage; add the size of your mailboxes to this if you are also migrating your email accounts.

If your usage consistently exceeds 80% of your quota, it is worth upgrading to a larger plan or tidying up: delete old backups, clear your email Trash and Spam folders, and remove unused image files and plugins.