In this tutorial, we’ve asked our top tier system administrators to explain how to manage disk usage to prevent the account from filling up.
Why don’t we give unlimited disk space?
Unlike cheap hosts, disk space is a premium service because the security of your data is critical. In the event of a site getting hacked or simple human error when a client deletes important files by accident, we can very likely get that data back for you quickly. The disk space you’re actually paying for is about 6 times as large as your hosting package states because of how many backups we make to your site. In addition to backing up every day for 3 days, we also we make weekly backups, and preserve the backup on the first of each month for two months. For physical disaster recover to data centers (tornado, hurricane, terrorism, fire, etc.), we also copy backups to an off site location in another state. Actively monitoring and managing all these backups is a time consuming and processor consuming process that can only be achieved if we limit the amount of clients that can be on any of our servers. One of the other benefits is that websites come up faster on a server that isn’t overloaded.
WARNING: Deleting files that you didn’t specifically create will likely result in very bad things happening to your website or email. If you suspect something needs to be deleted but are not sure, ask for help from our 24/7 support.
Disk Space Management
This Disk Usage tool is your friend. The Disk Usage tool will help you quickly identify what areas to look for major areas of disk space usage.
Log into your Control Panel and click on the Disk Usage tool to get an idea of the files and directories that are the biggest consumers of disk space.
There are a few common areas that to focus on.
- The / or root directory of your account.
- The /public_html directory which contains all your website files.
- The /mail directory which contains all your email boxes and files.
Helpful Hint: WordPress! When uploading images to WordPress make sure the maximum size of the image being uploaded it s the actual dimensions (in pixels) that you will be using on your site. Uploading huge files that will not be used simply wastes disk space. Further, WordPress generates at least 4 copies of every image you upload to the image library. In most cases, your site will only be using one of these. The rest are bloat. You may want to research plugins that remove unused images.
Email Account Quotas
You can limit each email box to a certain size. This will prevent any one user from jamming your account full of email. It’s easy to set the maximum disk usage any email box can use by logging into your Control Panel, clicking on the Email Accounts tool. Then to the right of each email box is a link for “Disk and Quota”. By clicking that link you will have the option to set a quota for that email box. Note that you can get notifications that the user’s email box is getting full if you’ve filled out your email contact inform in the Control Panel > Contact Information tool. Once the email box is full, new emails will be returned to the sender with a note that they should try again later because the email box is full.
Automated Management of Email Account Disk Usage
One of the newest and most useful tools for managing disk space is our Email Disk Management tool in your control panel. Using this tool you can have the server delete old emails based on age, size, and other criteria. This feature is found by logging into your Control Panel, click on the Email Accounts tool, then “Disk and Quota” link to the right of the email box you wish to automate, and finally click on the “Manage Disk Usage” link in this section.