My account has run out of disk space!

Please feel free to contact us when your account has reached its disk space quota. We can check if it is possible to clear some space, and if needed we can temporarily increase the quota. The latter is useful, as even removing files can be difficult when your account has run out of space.

Common cause of disk space issues

The two most common reasons for disk space issues are large backup files and large email accounts. There can be other reasons though, such as large log files or databases.

Backup files

If you use Softaculous or a WordPress plugin to take regular backups then you probably want to stop doing so. The backups can be very large, in particular if your website has lots of binary files (such as images). Keeping those backups on the server doesn’t make a lot of sense. You can instead use cPanel’s Backup tool. Doing so has two advantages:

• The backup files can be downloaded to your computer.
• You can easily restore the backups via the backup manager.

A downside of cPanel’s backup feature is that you need to make the backups manually. In general, it is good practice to make a backup before you do any major work on your website. That way you can always roll back any changes you made. In addition you may want to do the occasional backup – say, once a month. You don’t really have to make backups more often, as we already make a full backup of all our servers every night. The backups are retained for seven days, so we can always roll back your website if disaster strikes.

Email accounts

Email accounts can grow very quickly. If you are using an email client such as Outlook, Mac Mail or Thunderbird then you can archive old emails locally. Emails you archive are moved from the mail server to your email client, which means that you still got access to your emails.

If you prefer to store all your emails on the mail server then you may want to consider separating your website and email hosting. For instance, our Office 365 plans come with 50GB mailboxes. By using Office 365 you are unlikely to ever need to worry about disk space quotas, and you get some other benefits as well, such as shared contacts and calendars.

Another option may be to delete emails that are older than a certain date. You can do so via cPanel’s Email Disk Usage feature.

You can also have a look at the default mailbox. This mailbox collects bounce emails for emails that have been sent by a script, cron job messages and, depending on how the mailbox is set up, emails sent to non-existing users. If the mailbox is very large then you can probably empty it. At the same time you may want to check why the mailbox is collecting lots of emails. Often, a large default mailbox points to an issue with your account. For instance, lots of bounce emails in the inbox may indicate that a lot of spam is being submitted via forms on your website. Or, lots of cron emails may indicate that one or more cron jobs aren’t working correctly.

Error logs

There are other possible reasons why your website is using a lot of disk space. If your website is generating lots of PHP notices, warnings and/or errors then there may be very large error_log files. You can safely delete these files, but we strongly suggest to first investigate the errors.

WordPress image library

When you upload an image via WordPress it will, by default, create three additional image files: a thumbnail, medium-sized and large-sized image. That is useful, as it enables your WordPress install to serve relatively small images (which makes web pages load faster). It also means that you don’t have to worry about the size of the original image you upload.

Uploading really large images does mean, however, that you are wasting disk space. The original images are stored on the server, even if they are not used. It is therefore best practice to optimise images before you upload them, for instance by cropping and/or resizing them.

It is also worth noting that some WordPress themes create lots of additional images files from images you upload. Most of these image sizes may never be used, but the images do of course take up space. You may be able to limit the number of images that are created in the theme’s settings.

Large databases

You can see the size of databases via cPanel’s Databases interface, and if you got a large database then you can check the size of individual tables via phpMyAdmin. If you click on the database name in the left-hand pane you get an overview of all tables. The last two columns show the Size and Overhead. You can click on the header to sort the tables. For instance, clicking on the Size header sorts the tables by size.

• The size is the amount of disk space tables use. It may be possible to delete data from large tables. A typical example are spammy WordPress comments and/or users. If your WordPress site doesn’t have proper spam protection you probably got lots of unmoderated spam comments. It is safe to delete these (preferably via the WordPress dashboard). Note, however, that this may not reduce the disk space usage. Data that is deleted from InnoDB tables is still kept on the server until you optimise the table
• The overhead is the amount of space you gain when you optimise a table. When a database query is run MySQL/MariaDB doesn’t automatically compact database files. That improves performance, but over time the overhead can take up quite a bit of space. If you have tables with a large overhead then you can optimise the tables by clicking the Select tables with overhead link below the table overview and selecting Optimize table from the drop-down list.

Remember: we are here to help

Troubleshooting disk space issues can be tricky. If you are not quite sure how to deal with a disk space issue, please do contact us.