Performance profile · Artist portfolios
Web hosting for artists — Disk space is the wrong number to shop on
Nobody ever left a painter's site because the plan was 10 GB rather than 200 — they left because one image took nine seconds to appear.
The short answer
Ignore the disk column. What decides an artist's site is the weight of a single displayed image and whether the page is cached, and both are measurable in a minute: PageSpeed Insights names the largest contentful paint element, and DevTools tells you what that file weighs.
Sprint at $2.42 a month gives you 10 GB of NVMe behind a LiteSpeed cache with WebP conversion included, which is the combination that matters. Free SSL, free migration, daily backups and no setup fee come with it on every tier.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
Free
Migration in, engineer-handled
24/7
Answers from humans, any hour
Daily
Backups taken every day
$0
Setup charge on any tier
A body of work organised by series, an about page, an exhibition history and a way to buy or commission — that is the whole site, and almost all of it is text. The interesting part is the small number of pages carrying the work itself.
Artists tend to shop for hosting on storage, because a folder of scans feels large. In practice a web-sized image of a painting is a few hundred kilobytes and a career's worth of them barely troubles the entry plan. What hurts is uploading the archival scan and letting the browser download all of it.
So this page is about weight rather than capacity: what to measure, what compression genuinely costs a painting, and what changes when you start selling from the same site.
Weight is the constraint; capacity almost never is
Open a series page in DevTools with the Network panel showing and Disable cache ticked. Read the total transfer size at the bottom and the largest single file in the list. On most artists' sites that one file is between two and eight megabytes, and it is an archival scan doing a job a 1600-pixel export would do better.
Then check the document row's waiting time — your time to first byte, which belongs to the server and should be under 800 milliseconds. Separating those two numbers is the whole diagnosis. One of them is your upload habit; the other is your host.
Compression, colour and what survives the encoder
WebP conversion is included on every plan here and runs on the server, which means the largest available saving is applied without you installing anything. For flat colour, line work and prints it is close to invisible. For heavily textured oil and impasto it works less magic, because fine texture is exactly what compression struggles with.
Export in sRGB rather than a wide-gamut profile for anything shown in a browser, since that is the space browsers assume, and keep the archival file for print. Strip the embedded profile and EXIF block from web copies. On a page of thirty works those savings compound into something a visitor can feel.
Selling makes half the site uncacheable
As soon as there is a basket, part of the site stops benefiting from the cache. Product pages can still be cached, but basket, checkout and account pages must run PHP on every request by design — that is not a fault, it is how a shop works.
That is the point where the CPU allocation on the plan matters. Sprint provides one core and 2 GB of RAM, Nitro at $7.08 provides two cores and 4 GB with PHP X-Ray on CloudLinux Pro for tracing a slow request. Buy that when the shop exists, not in anticipation of it.
The upgrade path, and when to take it
Sprint carries one site on 10 GB with 25 MySQL databases. Turbo at $4.66 takes you to 25 sites and 50 databases, which is the tier for anyone running a separate site for a collective, a studio or a commission service. Nitro at $7.08 brings 200 GB and 100 sites.
Upgrades apply in place. The account allocation changes and the site does not move, so there is no migration, no downtime and no DNS work involved — which is the sensible way to buy capacity when a measurement finally asks for it.
Sized on weight, not on a storage column
WebP conversion, LiteSpeed caching and NVMe storage are on every tier, so the things that actually decide how a painting appears on screen are not reserved for the expensive plan.
Migration is free and handled by our engineers, there is no setup charge on any tier, and hosting plans carry a 30-day money-back window.
- WebP conversion applied server-side at no extra cost
- NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching on all three tiers
- In-place upgrades — the allocation grows, the site stays
- No setup fee, and a 30-day window on hosting plans
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
The saving applied for you
Server-side WebP conversion is the biggest single win on an image page, and it needs no plugin.
Cached series pages
LiteSpeed answers a logged-out gallery page from server memory, without PHP starting at all.
Capacity when it is asked for
Sprint's 10 GB carries a career of web-sized work; Turbo and Nitro are there when a shop or a second site arrives.
A profiler on the top tier
PHP X-Ray on CloudLinux Pro shows what a checkout request spends its time on instead of leaving you to guess.
Nothing to pay to begin
No setup charge on any tier, and hosting plans carry a 30-day money-back window.
Restores you run
Daily backups sit in the panel with a one-click restore, so a bad theme update costs minutes.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Weigh a series page
Disable cache, load the page, and note the total transfer size, the largest single file and the document's waiting time.
- 2
Come across at no cost
Free engineer-handled migration for an existing site, or a one-click WordPress install with a portfolio theme.
- 3
Re-export and re-measure
Resize to display dimensions, let WebP conversion do the rest, then run the same test and compare the medians.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- Server-side WebP conversion included on every plan
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not only the expensive ones
- LiteSpeed caching in the web server rather than added by plugin
- In-place account upgrades — no migration when you change plan
- PHP X-Ray on CloudLinux Pro for tracing slow requests on Nitro
- Free SSL on every plan, renewed automatically before it can expire
- Daily backups, with self-service restores from the control panel
- Zero setup charges on any tier — nothing to pay to begin
- Free migration of your existing site, carried out by our engineers
- Money-back cover: 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
Is 10 GB really enough for a body of work?
For web-sized images, yes, comfortably. A display-resolution export of a painting is a few hundred kilobytes, so several thousand of them fit inside the 10 GB Sprint provides at $2.42 a month. The mistake is uploading archival scans and letting the browser download them — that fills a disk quickly and makes the page slow, which is two problems for the price of one.
Does WebP conversion damage how the work looks?
For flat colour, line work and print reproduction the difference is effectively invisible at the sizes a browser displays. Heavy texture is harder, because fine detail is precisely what any encoder struggles with, so check a textured piece yourself before committing. Either way the conversion happens on the server and the original file you uploaded is untouched.
What changes technically when I start selling prints?
Basket, checkout and account pages cannot be cached, because they are different for every visitor by definition. Those requests run PHP and query the database every time, which is real work rather than a cache hit. That is the moment CPU headroom matters — two cores and 4 GB of RAM on Nitro at $7.08 — and PHP X-Ray is there to show you which request is expensive.
Do I have to move the site to change plan?
No. Upgrades are applied in place: the account's allocation changes while the files, the databases and the DNS all stay exactly where they are. There is no migration window, no downtime and nothing to reconfigure, which means you can buy capacity at the point a measurement asks for it rather than guessing a year ahead.
Keep reading
Medical Clinics — Hosting Guide
Sites where privacy rules and page speed have to be satisfied at the same time.
Property Managers — Hosting Guide
Listing-heavy sites and the caching behaviour that keeps a long index quick.
Best Hosting With Free SSL
Certificates included on every plan, and what the handshake costs a first-time visitor.
Web Hosting — Built for Artists
The shared platform in full: NVMe, LiteSpeed, free SSL and migration from $2.42 a month.
PHP Hosting
PHP versions, extensions and per-site switching from the control panel.
Changing hosts? Run through our checklist first.
A straightforward sequence for a switch your visitors never feel: which files move first, how to shift email across without losing a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind almost all the downtime we get asked to rescue.
Shop on weight, not on gigabytes.
NVMe behind LiteSpeed with WebP conversion included, from $2.42 a month, free migration and no setup fee.
View Web Hosting — Built for Artists plans