What if the anxious little thing you currently call “my website” is actually just asking you, in its faint HTML whisper, for a humane place to live rather than the industrial server compound you think it needs?
Why Web Hosting Feels Way More Complicated Than It Actually Is
I find that “web hosting” tends to sound bigger and more ominous than it deserves—like you’re signing a lease on some vast, humming digital warehouse when, in reality, your site might be the equivalent of a small studio apartment with a folding chair and a single plant.
Under all the marketing speak, web hosting is just this: paying someone to keep your website’s files on a computer that’s always connected to the internet, so that when people type in your domain, those files can be sent to their browser. That’s it. The drama starts when you have to decide how much of that computer’s power, space, and bandwidth your “small shivering consciousness” of a website actually requires.
The question is not “What’s the best hosting plan?”; the question is “What is the least I can reasonably get away with while still being kind to my users and my future self?”
The Three Core Resources Your Fragile Website Actually Uses
If I strip away the vendor jargon, I notice there are three resources I always end up thinking about when choosing hosting: disk space, bandwidth, and compute power. Everything else—SSL, email, backups, CDNs—are accessories to those three.
Disk Space: How Many Boxes of Stuff Your Website Owns
Disk space is how much data your site’s files take up on the server: HTML, CSS, images, videos, databases, logs, backups, and any assorted junk you forgot to delete. Hosting companies like to print big gigabyte or “unlimited” numbers here because it looks generous, but the reality is that most small sites barely fill a fraction of what they are “given.”
For a normal small site—think brochure, portfolio, or blog without a hoarder’s archive of giant images—disk space is almost never the real bottleneck. The goal is not “as much as possible.” The goal is “enough that I don’t have to think about it for the next few years.”
Bandwidth: How Much Traffic Your Visitors Consume
Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred between your server and your visitors over a period of time (typically measured per month). Each time someone visits your site, their browser downloads some of your files. Multiply that by the number of visits per month, and you get your bandwidth usage.
This is where your “small shivering consciousness” can actually cause real strain if it suddenly becomes popular. Bandwidth is the main thing that spikes when you get a traffic surge, and it is also where vague promises like “unmetered” and “unlimited” start to hide all sorts of fine print.
Compute Power (CPU/RAM): How Hard the Server Has to Think
Compute power is how much actual processing power (CPU) and short-term memory (RAM) your website consumes while running. Static pages hardly need any. Complex apps, e‑commerce sites, and bloated plugins can chew through it quickly.
Most small websites run on shared hosting, which means they get a slice of CPU and RAM on a server they share with dozens or hundreds of other innocent strangers. The upside: cheap. The downside: noisy neighbors. If your site or someone else’s site hogs resources, everything slows down.
I try to think of compute power as the website analog to “How many tabs do I have open in my brain?” The more complicated the site, the more it thrashes.
Naming the Creature: What Kind of Website Am I Actually Hosting?
Before I can choose rational hosting, I need to stop thinking about some imaginary future mega-platform and actually name what the thing is today. A fragility test, almost. What is my “small shivering consciousness” going to do in the world?
The Four Common Species of Small Websites
I find that most small sites fall into one of these buckets:
| Type of Site | Main Purpose | Typical Tech | Complexity Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static brochure / portfolio | Present info, contact details, “about” page | HTML/CSS, static generator | Low |
| Simple blog / content site | Regular articles, posts, light media | WordPress, Ghost, static blog | Low–Medium |
| Small business / e‑commerce | Sell products/services, bookings | WordPress + WooCommerce, Shopify | Medium–High |
| Web app / SaaS prototype | Custom features, user accounts, dashboards | Node, Django, Rails, Laravel, etc. | High |
Each type pulls differently on hosting resources:
- Static brochure: tiny disk, low CPU, low bandwidth (unless your images are absurd).
- Blog: modest disk, modest CPU (spikes during publishing or traffic jumps), more steady bandwidth.
- Small e‑commerce: more database use, heavier CPU and RAM, more security needs, more bandwidth.
- Web app: CPU‑ and RAM‑sensitive, depends strongly on architecture, possibly heavy storage, can be spiky.
If I fit my idea into one of these categories honestly, most of the hosting questions answer themselves.
How to Estimate Disk Space Without Spiraling
Disk space is the easiest place to make a decision grounded in arithmetic rather than fear. I walk through it by imagining all the actual files.
A Simple Way to Do the Math
I can estimate disk space with a basic breakdown:
- Core site files (HTML, CSS, JS, theme, plugins)
- Media files (images, documents, videos)
- Database (posts, pages, user data)
- Overhead (logs, cache, backups, temporary files)
Here’s a rough table I use for typical small sites:
| Site Type | Core Files | Media (initial) | DB (initial) | Overhead (buffer) | Reasonable Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Static brochure | 50–150 MB | 100–500 MB | N/A or tiny | 200–300 MB | 1–2 GB |
| Small personal blog (WordPress) | 200–400 MB | 500 MB–2 GB | 100–300 MB | 500 MB | 2–5 GB |
| Growing blog / small magazine | 300–600 MB | 2–10 GB | 300–800 MB | 1–2 GB | 5–20 GB |
| Small e‑commerce | 500–800 MB | 2–8 GB | 500 MB–2 GB | 2–4 GB | 10–30 GB |
These are not hard boundaries, but they are decent sanity checks. If your host is offering 200 GB “because value,” I remind myself that I am not, in fact, running Netflix.
Media: The Quiet Disk Hog
The real danger in disk space for small sites is media—specifically huge, uncompressed images and uploaded videos. A single full‑width hero image straight from a camera can be 8–20 MB; a normal page might serve several of them.
I try to be ruthless:
- Compress images (modern formats like WebP or AVIF where possible).
- Resize them to the actual display size, not the camera’s native resolution.
- Avoid self‑hosting videos unless absolutely necessary; use a platform like YouTube, Vimeo, or specialized video hosting and embed.
If I do that once, disk space becomes a non-problem for a long time.
Shared vs “Unlimited”: What’s Really Going On
“Unlimited” disk space is marketing shorthand for “we don’t bother metering small accounts closely because the real limits are elsewhere.” There are almost always fair‑use policies, inode limits (number of files), or performance caps.
I interpret “unlimited” as “enough for normal small sites, but don’t try to turn this plan into cloud storage or a file‑sharing service.” If I intend to host thousands of large files, I assume I do not, in fact, have unlimited space.
Bandwidth: How to Avoid Paying for Popularity The Wrong Way
Bandwidth is where you begin to pay for being even slightly successful. It is also where panic fantasies about “going viral” tend to distort decision-making.
A Back‑Of‑The‑Envelope Bandwidth Formula
I estimate bandwidth something like this:
Monthly Bandwidth ≈ Average Page Size × Average Pageviews per Visit × Monthly Visits
Suppose:
- Average page size: 1.5 MB (a modest page with some images and CSS/JS)
- Average pageviews per visit: 2
- Monthly visits: 3,000
Then:
- Data per visit = 1.5 MB × 2 = 3 MB
- Monthly bandwidth = 3 MB × 3,000 = 9,000 MB ≈ 9 GB
Here’s a quick reference:
| Monthly Visits | Avg Page Size | Pages per Visit | Approx Bandwidth / Month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 1 MB | 2 | ~2 GB |
| 5,000 | 1.5 MB | 2 | ~15 GB |
| 10,000 | 2 MB | 2 | ~40 GB |
| 50,000 | 1.5 MB | 2.5 | ~187 GB |
Most “small consciousness” websites are under 10,000 visits/month for a long time. That means a plan offering 50–100 GB/month of bandwidth is usually more than sufficient initially, especially if I use caching and a CDN.
“Unmetered” Bandwidth and the Fine Print
When a host says “unmetered bandwidth,” they usually mean “we aren’t going to bill you per gigabyte as long as your resource usage stays within the reasonable limits of the shared environment.” The real caps show up as:
- CPU and memory throttling
- Connection limits
- Service suspension if you use too much bandwidth in too “sustained” a way
I treat “unmetered” as “adequate unless this quietly becomes a mid‑sized media site or app,” not as literal infinity.
When Bandwidth Actually Starts to Matter
Bandwidth becomes a serious constraint when:
- I host large downloadable files (e.g., software, PDFs, audio).
- I self‑host media, especially videos or high‑res audio.
- My pages become absurdly heavy (multi‑MB frameworks, unoptimized images).
- I hit tens of thousands of visitors per month or more.
If I see myself going there, I plan for a host that makes upgrading easy or supports simple integration with a CDN or object storage.
Compute Power: The Part Hosts Like to Hide in the Shadows
CPU and RAM are where cost really lives. They are also what determines whether my small site feels snappy or sluggish under even modest traffic.
Why Small Sites Often Feel Slow on Cheap Hosting
On low‑end shared plans, providers pack many sites onto the same machine. If any of those sites is misconfigured, hacked, or just busy, the shared CPU and memory get congested, and everything slows down. My site may be blameless, but it waits in the same queue.
Even without neighbors, a small site can hurt itself through:
- Heavy plugins (especially on WordPress)
- Poor caching
- Inefficient database queries
- Bloated themes or page builders
In theory, a plain static brochure site would run fine on almost anything. The problem is that real sites accumulate cruft as they grow—much like the physical junk in any apartment.
How Much CPU/RAM Do I Actually Need?
Hosts rarely describe plans as “0.5 CPU core and 512 MB RAM,” but under the hood, this is roughly what’s going on. As a rule of thumb:
| Site Type | Concurrent Visitors | CPU & RAM Needs | Suitable Hosting Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static brochure |