Help Centre / Plans, Limits And Billing
Storage Explained
Storage is the space your websites take up on disk. It covers two things: the files that make up the site, and the database behind it. Both are added together into the account figure you see on the Usage page. A single site’s Usage tab shows its files and its database separately.
What Counts
- Your website files. WordPress itself, your theme, your plugins, and everything in the uploads folder.
- Your database. Posts, pages, products, orders, options, users and every table a plugin has created.
That is the whole list. Files and database share one number because they share one disk.
What Does Not Count
Backups are stored separately and do not count toward your storage. The nightly backups we keep for you live outside your site’s space, so having a lot of restore points never eats into your allowance.
That is only true of the backups the platform takes. A backup made by a plugin inside your own site, such as a zip sitting in wp-content/updraft, is a file in your web root like any other, and it does count. See how backups work for what we keep and for how long.
The Allowance Belongs To The Account
Storage is pooled in the same way bandwidth is. Every website on the account draws from one figure, so a small landing page leaves more room for a shop with thousands of product images. You do not have to divide anything up in advance.
| Plan | Storage |
|---|---|
| Build | 10 GB |
| Grow | 20 GB |
| Scale | 30 GB |
If you want to stop one website from taking the lot, you can set a cap on it. See set a usage cap on a website. A cap is a ceiling inside the shared pool rather than an allowance of its own.
What Happens If You Run Over
This is where storage behaves differently from bandwidth, and the difference matters.
Running past your storage allowance does not suspend anything. Your websites stay up, visitors keep being served, and nothing is deleted. We tell you, and we ask you to clear space or move up a plan. Compare that with bandwidth, where passing 100% of the account’s monthly figure suspends that account’s websites until the next period or an upgrade. See bandwidth explained for how that side works.
| Storage | Bandwidth | |
|---|---|---|
| Shared across the account | Yes | Yes |
| Resets each month | No, it is a standing figure | Yes, on your billing day |
| Over the limit | You are told and asked to clear space | Websites are suspended |
| Can be capped per site | Yes | Yes |
Storage does not reset, because it is not consumption. It is what you are keeping. The number goes down when you delete something and up when you add something.
Where To See It
Open a website in the members area and go to its Usage tab for the space that site is using; the Usage page at account level shows the total and the breakdown per website. Files are measured every five minutes and databases every fifteen, rather than the instant you upload a file.
What Usually Fills A Site Up
Four things account for most of the sites we see run short.
- Old backups left inside the site. Plugins such as UpdraftPlus keep their archives in your uploads folder by default, and each one is a full copy of the site. A site with six months of weekly archives can be several times the size of the site itself. Since the platform already backs you up, the clean answer is to turn the plugin’s local copies off and delete what it has stored.
- Media library originals. A photograph straight off a phone or a camera can be 6 MB or more, and WordPress keeps the original alongside every resized version it generates. A few hundred of those is gigabytes. Resizing images before you upload them fixes this permanently, and it helps your bandwidth and your page speed at the same time.
- WooCommerce session and log tables. A busy shop writes a row for every visitor session and every action some plugins log. Left alone for a year these tables grow to a size out of all proportion to the number of orders. They are safe to trim.
- Post revisions. WordPress saves a full copy of a post every time you save a draft. A long page edited many times can carry dozens of revisions, each one a row of its own.
Clearing Space
Work in that order, biggest first. Delete plugin backups from the uploads folder over SFTP or from inside the plugin. Remove media you no longer use. Trim the WooCommerce tables and old revisions with a database tool, or over WP-CLI if you are comfortable on the command line.
Take a backup before you delete anything from the database, and check the Backups tab shows a recent restore point before you start. Trimming tables is routine, but a mistake there is harder to undo than a mistake with files.
Also worth checking: a staging site is a full copy of your site, so it uses space of its own. If you have finished with one, delete it.
If The Figure Looks Wrong
A site that reports far more than you can account for usually has something hidden in it: an old install in a subfolder, a cache folder a plugin never cleared, or a very large log file. Open a ticket from the members area and we will tell you which folders and tables the space is actually in.
Did this answer it? If not, open a ticket from the members area and someone who runs the platform will pick it up.
Open A Ticket