When choosing shared hosting plans, it’s easy to come away with the impression that there isn’t much disc space involved. After all, hard drives are measured in sometimes hundreds of gigabytes—some are even measured in terabytes now—and most hosting plans are only a few gigabytes. The realities of disc space are different on the web, however, than they are on personal computers.

Websites are typically very small in size. This owes to the fact that all of the media on an internet site must be compressed to allow reasonable loading times. Images, video and audio are all saved in formats that greatly reduce the overall file size. If you’re looking at your website on your computer’s directory and it’s measured in gigabytes, it’s likely because some of the media has yet to be compressed.

Web pages themselves are far smaller than most people imagine. In fact, a web page is simply a text file. The media included in the file is pulled together in the order specified by the page when the user makes a request. Your site may have hundreds of pages, but those pages themselves are very small.

Even sites with a large amount of media usually consume little disc space. To confirm this, look at the file size of most photos. You’ll find that sizes between 100 and 600 KB are typical. A gigabyte is roughly 1,000,000 Kilobytes. Simple math reveals that a modest hosting plan is capable of handling large amounts of media!