When the Hosting Account Runs Out of Space

The morning the space runs out

Every hosting account has a limit on how much it can store. For years nobody thinks about it, because the website itself is small.

Then on an ordinary morning a photograph will not upload, a customer says their email bounced, or the contact form stops sending.

The website did not grow. Everything around it did: copies of the site made every night, logs nobody reads, and every email the office has received since the account was opened.

When the space is gone, the server cannot write anything new, and a surprising amount of what a website does depends on writing something new.

What fills an account

• Backups kept inside the account, often one a night, never deleted.
• Email stored on the server, with years of attachments, sent items and trash.
• Log files that grow every time something throws an error.
• Cache folders that rebuild constantly and are rarely cleared out.
• Photographs uploaded at full camera size.
• Archives and installers left behind after a move or an update.

The second is the one that surprises people. If the office email shares the hosting account, every attachment ever received counts against the same limit, and a busy inbox can outgrow the website many times over.

What stops working

Uploads fail first, usually with a vague error, because there is nowhere to put the file.

Email starts bouncing. Senders get a message saying the mailbox is over its quota, and many will not try again.

Updates can fail half-way, which is worse than not starting. A plugin left half replaced can take the whole site down.

The database cannot save, so orders, form entries and comments go missing. Sometimes even logging in fails, because logging in writes to the database too.

And the nightly backup quietly fails, so the newest good copy of the site gets older every day.

Checking the figure

Most hosting control panels show disk usage on the first screen, as space used against the account's limit. Look at it today and write it down.

The same panel usually has a disk usage page that breaks the total down by folder, which shows in a minute where the bulk sits.

The email section normally lists each mailbox with its size. One person's ten-year-old inbox is often the largest single thing in the account.

A worked example

A freight broker with five staff runs its email on the same hosting account as its website, a plain site with a quote request form.

Every load produces paperwork by email: rate confirmations, bills of lading, proof of delivery, invoices. Most are PDF attachments, all kept on the server so anyone can find them.

One morning a shipper phoned to say a load tender had bounced. The quote form had stopped sending too.

The account was full. The mailboxes held years of attachments, and a backup plugin had been saving a complete copy of the site into the account every night.

The backups were downloaded and deleted, and the plugin now keeps only a week of copies on the server and sends each one to separate storage. Older mail was archived to the office's own storage and removed from the server.

The limit was raised to leave room, and a warning now goes to the office manager when usage nears it.

Backups belong somewhere else

A backup stored in the same account as the site protects against a bad update. It does not protect against losing the account, the server or the login.

It also adds a full copy of the site to the pile every night.

Keep a few recent copies on the server if the backup tool needs them, and send the rest to storage held in the business's own name.

Then restore one somewhere as a test. A copy nobody has ever restored is a guess about what would happen on a bad day.

Email is usually the largest part

Mail kept on the server, which is how most offices set up phones and laptops now, never leaves unless someone deletes it.

Emptying the trash and spam folders on the server is safe and often frees a surprising amount.

Older mail can be archived to the office's own computers and removed from the server, keeping the last year or two online.

Ask each person before touching their mailbox. What looks like clutter can be the only copy of a contract.

Some businesses move email off the hosting account altogether, so a full mailbox can never stop the website.

Logs, caches and what to leave alone

A log that grows by the day usually means something is wrong, such as a plugin throwing the same warning on every page view. Have your developer read it before it goes, or it simply comes back.

Cache folders can normally be emptied from the caching plugin's settings, and the site rebuilds what it needs.

Leave the uploads folder alone unless each file has been checked against the site, and leave database tables to whoever knows what created them.

Anything in a folder nobody recognises waits for the host or your developer. A day's wait costs nothing next to deleting the wrong thing.

Whose job it is

Disk space is the kind of thing everyone assumes somebody else is watching: the host, the developer, whoever set up the email.

Most hosts do not watch it for you. Control panels can usually send a warning as the account nears its limit, but it goes to whatever address was entered when the account was opened.

Decide who receives it. A developer on a maintenance plan should be checking the figure monthly, and if there is no such arrangement, that gap is worth closing.

The counter-case

A small brochure site with its email elsewhere may never come near its limit. A check once or twice a year is enough there.

Buying more space is sometimes the right answer, when the business genuinely stores more than it used to. It is the wrong answer when the space is full of nightly copies and spam.

Either way, know the figure, keep backups off the account and name the person who watches it.

Before it fills again

1. Check the disk usage in your control panel.
2. Find the three largest folders or mailboxes.
3. Download old backups, then delete them from the account.
4. Send future backups off the server.
5. Empty trash and spam in every mailbox.
6. Ask why any log keeps growing.
7. Send the usage warning to someone who reads it.

Step four matters most and costs almost nothing. The account stops filling every night, and the business finally has a copy of its site that would survive losing the account.

Whether a site needs its files copied to servers elsewhere is a separate question, covered in a content delivery network for a local business site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.