How much disk space do you need for an ecommerce website?

Published on February 12, 2008 How much disk space do you need for an ecommerce website?

How much disk space will you need for your shopping cart website?

The amount of capacity you will need for your ecommerce website mainly depends on:

• How many products you will display
• How many images will be associated with those products
• The quality of those images – in most cases, product images will be under 200kb to make them easy to download in customer’s browsers if they are clicked on
• Whether you are using the built-in image zoom function of your store (as you’ll need bigger images to zoom in to)
• Whether you will be including other content such as video on your static content pages
• If you are offering downloadable products, the size of the files customers can download once purchased
• How many emails you wish to keep stored on the server
• The disk storage space that your ecommerce shopping cart takes when installed (either self-hosted or hosted)

If you have between 1-500 products then 500-900mb should be sufficient for most business applications. However, for customers with a large number of products or stored emails, a bigger allowance would be required. If you will store email on the server, you will need at least 4 GB of storage. This would allow you to store thousands of emails.

Don’t forget bandwidth

As well as disk space make sure you consider the monthly traffic allowance from your shopping cart software provider. The more traffic you are allowed, the more visitors you can get to your site and the more work you can do on your site uploading images, changing descriptions, and so on. Allowances of between 5 and 50 GB are common for bandwidth amongst the leading providers.

Ozcart has generous but realistic limits for bandwidth on its packages. Beware of providers offering unlimited bandwidth because servers are limited in resources and it’s most likely a marketing trick and that they are limiting you in another way: either by restricting the number of products you can add, putting tougher limits on the disk space you can have, or putting per user limits on your usage. It always pay to read the fine print: we are transparent but not all providers are created equal.

See our pricing and features for our hosted ecommerce shopping cart, Ozcart.