The site I have up now really isn't worth looking at. It's just a bit of text and some small CSS graphics, and I suppose it was meant to go somewhere at one time -- mostly sharing code snippets, a couple of stories and essays, and a few little art pieces. For interest's sake, it's under 500 KB as-is, and I suppose that if it were fully fleshed-out with what I'd originally planned to put up, it might have grown to as much as five or six megabytes.
I'm currently in the process of putting together a commercial site for a professional photography venture. (It is so-o-o nice to have the full-time use of my hands and arms again.) Keep in mind that this is going to be a thoroughly-polished, graphics-heavy site that is intended to give potential customers a fairly complete idea of what I can do in all of the genres of photography in which I'd feel comfortable charging money. It's also going to feature several in-depth tutorials (giving away technical secrets doesn't hurt—I know a lot of "photographers" who have gear I only wish I could own and never make any technical mistakes, but whose pictures wouldn't draw a second glance from anybody).
Because it's a commercial site, I won't be hosting it on a Free Hosting plan—I need the uptime assurances that come with a SLA, and SSL might become necessary at some point, so it'll be on Premium—but I think it's worth bringing up on this thread in any case because that site, which, as I said, is going to have to sell my photography to the world (or at least to the Greater Toronto Area) is going to come in at well under 100MB including the client proofing and ordering area. It's under 20MB with just my sales and tutorial stuff.
The largest images on the site, the ones that are meant to knock socks off and send people scrambling for their credit cards to reserve a shoot, are all well under 150KB (the actual file size depending on the amount of detail in the picture), and that's at a high enough quality level that absolutely no compression artifacts are visible anywhere. Of course, there are only going to be a couple of hundred non-CSS/non-client images on the site (it's a set of portfolios, not a museum), but that's really taking up a lot of server space by my standards. And the client area will be time-bombed—it's not a museum either, and if I haven't got print orders in six months, I'm probably not going to get them. The photos will still be available locally, but there's no reason for them to stay on the site forever.
Really—unless you're building a site with a whole bunch of community input, like a forum, the idea that you need gigs of space is a silly conceit. Your graphics/photos don't have to be multi-megapixel in size for people to enjoy them. (Facebook is the single biggest photo-sharing site on the planet now, bigger than Flickr, and look at the "large" size they show you.) You don't need to put every picture you've ever taken or seen up on the web; try putting up only the good ones. You can make pages incredibly complex and rich without using huge monolithic graphic elements. You really don't need that much space if Free Hosting is even close to a good fit for what you're doing and you're doing it right.
