Hey folks, I've been diving into free website hosting options and stumbled upon GitHub Pages. It seems pretty cool since it doesn't really have limits, aside from one thing I noticed: it mentions two main limitations: First, you can't use more than 1GB of storage total, and second, there's a maximum of 100GB of data transfer per month. I'm trying to understand what hitting that 1GB limit actually looks like in practice. Is it a lot of data? Like, would I run out of space after writing 30 lines of code? Can anyone offer examples of what might take up 1GB? I'm just trying to wrap my head around how much storage programming languages use, and what 1GB really translates to in terms of files and folders.
2 Answers
The 1GB limit is the total size of your repository, which includes all the static files and the built output. GitHub Pages usually hosts static sites, so if you have, say, a blog with 100 posts, that means 100 separate HTML files. Generally, 1GB is quite generous for just code and HTML. I could easily create a test blog with 3000 pages, and it wouldn't even come close to maxing that out. But if you introduce images, videos, or sound files, things can get hefty quickly. A good practice is to avoid storing media directly in your repo. Instead, consider using services like Cloudinary for your media storage and link to those files in your project instead!
To give you some perspective, the complete works of Shakespeare is only about 1/200th of a gigabyte in text. So if your entire project is less than 200 times that, you’re in the clear! However, keep in mind that images and videos are way larger than plain text, so if you add a lot of those, you’ll hit that 1GB limit much faster.
Yeah, my GitHub Pages site is already at 4GB, and I've been warned that deployment could fail because it’s too big. Still working for now, though!
Thanks for the quick info! Just to clarify, what exactly is a binary file?