It’s not uncommon for web hosts to provide unholy amounts of disk space to users. 50GBs! 100GBs! Unlimited storage!

The truth is, the vast majority of web sites on the internet are very, very small, and never have a need for anywhere near large numbers like that. In fact, web hosts offering tons of storage would never be able to supply it to their users if their users actually decided to take them up on it. Classic overselling, on a scale that far eclipses what the airlines do.

Here’s a little data to help clarify:

Birdhouse currently hosts 90 master accounts, for a total of around 200 domains. The current average size of all data stored for all web and mail accounts is 340MBs – and the majority of that is mail, not web files. But the average is itself misleading  – a small handful of sites storing a lot of audio or video grossly skew that average. To get a more accurate view of what most sites actually use, we need to calculate the median instead, and that number gives us 102MBs.

In other words, the vast majority of web sites will only ever utilize 1/500th of the 50GBs promised by the biggest overselling web hosts.

At Birdhouse, our disk quotas may look smaller than those of other web hosts, but we try not to oversell, and we provide more than enough storage room for all but the largest audio/video storage sites (and even those are now moving to storing large amounts of video on YouTube or Vimeo).

The more you know…