Answers.Body: <p>CiviCRM is distributed under a <a href="https://civicrm.org/license" rel="nofollow noreferrer">GNU AGPL 3 license</a>; there are no legal limits as to the number of contacts or number of users you can have.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>On the question of storage, it isn't easy to say definitively what a maximum number of contacts would be, or even how much disk space a certain number of contacts would require. </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Contacts are only a small part of a CRM system. You're also recording event participation, contributions, memberships, mailings, and so on. The more numerous these data points, the faster your storage needs will multiply.</p></li>
  <li><p>There can be huge variation in uploaded files like profile pictures, logos, or attached PDFs— these still count against any storage quota, even if they're not stored in the database.</p></li>
  <li><p>Even considering the database alone, not every field of every record will be populated; turning off geocoding or stripping down greetings will make a difference.</p></li>
  <li><p>Every site will have different custom fields, in number, type, and population.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Two identical databases can further differ based on the configuration of the system. For example, the number of <em>characters</em> you store in a database is <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4420164">different from</a> the number of <em>bytes</em> of space it takes up. In a character set like Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), all available characters can be stored in a single byte, but because UTF-8 includes a vastly larger range of characters, it might take up to 4 bytes (as of MySQL 5.6, MySQL will use <a href="https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/charset-unicode-utf8.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">up to three bytes</a>) to do so. The differential will not be significant for Western European languages, but would be radically so if your database contained Chinese characters for example.</p>
  
  <p>With MySQL, size limitations generally <a href="https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/table-size-limit.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">depend on the file system</a> (which relates to the operating system). Since InnoDB tables can span multiple files, your db can be quite large indeed; however, the time and memory it takes to search through exceptionally large databases could render CiviCRM impractical, and this of course relates to how fast the hard disk is and how much memory is available, and how your MySQL is configured. There is a whole cottage industry around MySQL tuning, though many of the tools like <a href="https://civicrm.stackexchange.com/questions/2888">MySQL Tuner</a> wouldn't be usable in a shared hosting environment.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>To illustrate, I have a CiviCRM 4.6.3 database with 2500 contacts in UTF-8 stored on an ext3 drive that is 202MB in size; there are various complex membership levels, monthly events, and frequent mailings maintained in CiviCRM. Another organization on the same server has almost 8800 records, also UTF-8, and 12 custom fields. Yet this database takes up only 13MB of space (!). That is because the vast majority of contacts are only a name and email address, and there are only a few dozen mailings stored in the system. </p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2015-06-16T19:44:46.780Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2015-06-16T19:44:46.780Z
Answers.LastEditDate: 2017-05-23T12:38:59.763Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: choster
Answers.Body: <p>To speak to your question about whether 10k or 25k might be too big for CiviCRM, I think everyone has a different personal take on what constitutes a "big" database, and use-cases do vary a lot, but from talking to different Civi users I get the general sense that (very roughly):</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>A "small" database is &lt; 100k contacts</li>
  <li>A "medium" database is 100k - 1M</li>
  <li>A "large" (sometimes called "enterprise") db is > 1M contacts</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Since the numbers you are talking about are on the smaller side of small, I don't think you'll have much trouble. I do know that people running medium-large and enterprise Civi sites have to get into some pretty serious caching/optimization/hardware, but I doubt you will need to.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2015-06-17T01:30:13.913Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2015-06-17T01:42:55.677Z
Answers.LastEditDate: 2015-06-17T01:42:55.677Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Coleman
Answers.Body: <p>1) There is no imposed restriction on the number of contacts.  MySQL has some theoretical limit that your would reach if you entered every person on the planet multiple times.</p>
  
  <p>2) As @choster spells out so thoroughly, every implementation is different so we can't say for sure what it will take.  Unless you have a tremendously rich and complex contact record, your 25k database will almost certainly be less than 100MB, probably much (much) smaller.  In terms of hosting, 1GB will cover you for a LONG time.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2015-06-17T01:40:10.153Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2015-06-17T01:40:10.153Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Eliot Mason
Body: <p>Apologies if these questions seem pretty elementary, but I am having a hard time finding definitive answers anywhere else on the web:</p>
  
  <p>1) Is there a maximum number of contacts one can include in a CiviCRM database? A lot of free CRM options out there have a 10,000-contact maximum, and I wanted to make sure CiviCRM does not.</p>
  
  <p>2) If there is no contact maximum, approximately how much hosting space would a 10,000-contact database require? What about a 25,000-contact database?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you so much in advance for any help with answering these questions!</p>
  
Tags: <contacts><hosting><performance>
Title: Number of contacts vs. hosting space required
ThreadText: # Number of contacts vs. hosting space required
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2015-06-16)
  
  Apologies if these questions seem pretty elementary, but I am having a hard time finding definitive answers anywhere else on the web:
  
  1) Is there a maximum number of contacts one can include in a CiviCRM database? A lot of free CRM options out there have a 10,000-contact maximum, and I wanted to make sure CiviCRM does not.
  
  2) If there is no contact maximum, approximately how much hosting space would a 10,000-contact database require? What about a 25,000-contact database?
  
  Thank you so much in advance for any help with answering these questions!
  
  **Tags:** contacts, hosting, performance
  
  
  ---
  
  ## 3 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_1 on 2015-06-16. Score: 15
  
  CiviCRM is distributed under a [GNU AGPL 3 license](https://civicrm.org/license); there are no legal limits as to the number of contacts or number of users you can have.
  
  ---
  
  On the question of storage, it isn't easy to say definitively what a maximum number of contacts would be, or even how much disk space a certain number of contacts would require.
  
  * Contacts are only a small part of a CRM system. You're also recording event participation, contributions, memberships, mailings, and so on. The more numerous these data points, the faster your storage needs will multiply.
  * There can be huge variation in uploaded files like profile pictures, logos, or attached PDFs— these still count against any storage quota, even if they're not stored in the database.
  * Even considering the database alone, not every field of every record will be populated; turning off geocoding or stripping down greetings will make a difference.
  * Every site will have different custom fields, in number, type, and population.
  
  Two identical databases can further differ based on the configuration of the system. For example, the number of *characters* you store in a database is [different from](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4420164) the number of *bytes* of space it takes up. In a character set like Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), all available characters can be stored in a single byte, but because UTF-8 includes a vastly larger range of characters, it might take up to 4 bytes (as of MySQL 5.6, MySQL will use [up to three bytes](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/charset-unicode-utf8.html)) to do so. The differential will not be significant for Western European languages, but would be radically so if your database contained Chinese characters for example.
  
  With MySQL, size limitations generally [depend on the file system](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/table-size-limit.html) (which relates to the operating system). Since InnoDB tables can span multiple files, your db can be quite large indeed; however, the time and memory it takes to search through exceptionally large databases could render CiviCRM impractical, and this of course relates to how fast the hard disk is and how much memory is available, and how your MySQL is configured. There is a whole cottage industry around MySQL tuning, though many of the tools like [MySQL Tuner](https://civicrm.stackexchange.com/questions/2888) wouldn't be usable in a shared hosting environment.
  
  ---
  
  To illustrate, I have a CiviCRM 4.6.3 database with 2500 contacts in UTF-8 stored on an ext3 drive that is 202MB in size; there are various complex membership levels, monthly events, and frequent mailings maintained in CiviCRM. Another organization on the same server has almost 8800 records, also UTF-8, and 12 custom fields. Yet this database takes up only 13MB of space (!). That is because the vast majority of contacts are only a name and email address, and there are only a few dozen mailings stored in the system.
  
  
  ---
  
  ### Answer by username_2 on 2015-06-17. Score: 10
  
  To speak to your question about whether 10k or 25k might be too big for CiviCRM, I think everyone has a different personal take on what constitutes a "big" database, and use-cases do vary a lot, but from talking to different Civi users I get the general sense that (very roughly):
  
  * A "small" database is < 100k contacts
  * A "medium" database is 100k - 1M
  * A "large" (sometimes called "enterprise") db is > 1M contacts
  
  Since the numbers you are talking about are on the smaller side of small, I don't think you'll have much trouble. I do know that people running medium-large and enterprise Civi sites have to get into some pretty serious caching/optimization/hardware, but I doubt you will need to.
  
  
  ---
  
  ### Answer by username_3 on 2015-06-17. Score: 6
  
  1) There is no imposed restriction on the number of contacts. MySQL has some theoretical limit that your would reach if you entered every person on the planet multiple times.
  
  2) As @username_1 spells out so thoroughly, every implementation is different so we can't say for sure what it will take. Unless you have a tremendously rich and complex contact record, your 25k database will almost certainly be less than 100MB, probably much (much) smaller. In terms of hosting, 1GB will cover you for a LONG time.
  
  
  ---
  
  