Looking at the Starter plan of 5GB, how would a non-technical person know if 5GB storage is enough?
We are looking at creating a community from a FB group of 10,000 people. Currently only 5 or so posts per day, but other times it’s been busier. I would expect that not all will migrate across. Most posts are text, often with a photo. Not so many videos. The intention is to build a knowledge base over time as well as community interaction.
If it gets to be a problem, you’ll have enough users that you won’t mind moving to a more expensive plan.
we’re not a business so that would involved a fundraising strategy, which I’d like to have a think about now rather than later.
This is a fair question; it’s hard to judge.
Text is essentially zero, to the point you can ignore it.
Images take up more space, but we have knobs available to downscale those and can recompress on the server side if you want to do that.
Videos are comparatively huge and will quickly eat up storage. You should prevent users from uploading them and suggest they use a dedicated video hosting service and link to them.
It’s not just hard to judge - it’s a moving target. 5GB will be enough, until you have accumulated enough uploads to use it all. If that’s a week, then of course 5G is not enough. But if it’s a year, or two years, is that enough? It depends on what timescale you are thinking of.
So, it’s about how many active users you accumulate, and how many images and videos you end up hosting. Which very much depends on the kinds of discussions you will have.
As a datapoint, my forum is 7 years old, has 959 users, 20 active users in last 30 days, 2700 topics, 260 posts in last 30 days, and a backup is about a gigabyte, 90% of which is uploads. Other forums will be very different.