How much disk space and bandwidth for an average size site?

I had another thread asking about moving to a shared account from my reseller. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with the shared route simply because I can get more space and bandwidth for the same price with a shared. Anyway, I'm wondering how much space and bandwidth and average size site would need? Currently I'm with resellerzoom and would be moving to hostingzoom for their shared hosting, and they only have one shared plan at 4.95 a month and you get 5GB of space and 100GB of bandwidth. Is this enough for an average size site, or not enough or maybe it's even a lot for a bigger site? I just have no concept of stuff like this, as currently I don't have any sites online to get a good comparison. The only problem with this plan is that it might be perfectly fine starting out for a small-medium site but they only have this one plan, no other shared plans. If my site/sites did get to big for this shared plan, I'd have to move to a semi-dedicated server plan at 65 a month. I just think it stinks there is nothing in between these two plans as far as price goes which it why I was also kinda looking at hostgator.com.

Any thoughts?

5gb space/100 GB BW a month should be plenty.

Even if the site were to start getting a ton of visitors? I can have up to 6 sites on that 5gb space / 100gb bandwidth. So would it be wise to have more than one site with this amount of space? Or would it not be able to handle more than one site?

5gb and 100GB for bandwidth is more than enough. If you popularity picks up you can easily transfer to a new account. When I moved a forum from virtual to shared, the host did all the work for me.

The one thing to watch out for is what do they do with overages? Will they cut you off or just add to the bill? You want them to just tack on the extra charges.

Unless you are planning on hosting video and really big pictures you won't even come close to using that 100 gigabytes of bandwidth. My forum with 5,000 members and several thousand high-res pictures only takes about 1.2GB of space and a little over a gig a day of bandwidth.

In other words, you are more than fine.

You'll likely pass 1m visitors a month before you pass 100gig of bandwidth, and 5 gig of space is really more than enough too for all but the biggest sites. I think a vbulletin with half a million posts might take up like 3gig.

Thanks guys.

I figured that would be WAY more than I needed for one site, but I figured here sometime down the road when I finally get a few sites up and running, that might be when I run into the problem with bandwidth/space? I know I can always just transfer hosts but that would mean me having to move a bunch of databases, files, images, etc, over to the new host and that's what I'm ultimately trying to avoid. I figure if I'm on a host that offers bigger plans, I can just email/call them and say "bump me up". But with hosting zoom, they have only that one shared plan.

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Originally Posted by deronsizemore

Currently I'm with resellerzoom and would be moving to hostingzoom for their shared hosting, and they only have one shared plan at 4.95 a month and you get 5GB of space and 100GB of bandwidth.

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In 11 years of hosting we've seen thousands of accounts. A fraction of 1 percent ever use more than 5BG space. A few percent use over 100GB. So yes you will be fine, and frankly you would know by now if you needed more than that.

However, just in case I would make sure that your host has several plans, can upgrade or downgrade on the fly. And what their overages are. Because you don't want to lock onto one plan and then your not able to get more.

Also, look for quality above price. IE in this case 10 of these accounts equals a 50 GIG HARD DRIVE and 10,000 GB. That is just bringing in $49! I can tell you a server like that can't be managed properly for less than $200-$300 so something is not quite right there. Look around a bit and stay safe!

I would recommend not going with HostGator as they have an unlimited plan that is not truly unlimited. Many people fall prey to this, unfortunately it is more of a marketing term. So unlimited may mean only <5gb for some hosts, as described in their TOS, although unlimited sounds like UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH(!!!). There are many e-commerce platforms to choose from and bandwidth allotments aren't bad. If you are unhappy with any of the bandwidth overage charges, there are services like bandwidthdiet.com or Amazon S3 that makes life easier.