A hosting support inbox classic: 'my storage is full' — followed by the discovery of 8GB of family videos or company archives inside public_html. Here is where files belong.
The mental separation - Hosting: serves WEBSITE files to visitors — code, images the site uses, scripts. Its job is speed and availability for the public internet - Cloud storage (Drive, Dropbox): holds YOUR files for YOUR access — archives, originals, backups, media libraries. Its job is capacity and sync
Why the mix-up costs money Storage on hosting plans is sized for websites (hundreds of MB to a few GB). Filling it with archives forces expensive upgrades for capacity you could have free (15GB Drive) or pennies (1TB Dropbox-class). Worse: large non-website files slow backups and violate most hosts' fair use.
The specific cases - Website images: hosting (they serve visitors) — compressed to WebP - Original photos/videos: cloud storage (they feed future work) - Site backups: BOTH — hosting's automatic versioning + your Drive copy (the 3-2-1 habit) - Client deliverables: Drive with a share link - Company documents: Drive/OneDrive - Videos for the site: YouTube/Vimeo embeds — never self-hosted video files
The clean-up routine (quarterly) Sort public_html by size: anything not referenced by the site gets a new home in the cloud. The storage graph in your portal drops — and the plan you have keeps being enough.
Hosting is a stage for your website, not a warehouse. Keep the warehouse elsewhere — it is free.