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General information

Your hosting account (your website and/or mailboxes) may stop working correctly if its disk space or inode quota limit is reached. For example, most website software applications need to create temporary files, and if your account has reached its disk space or inode quota limit, the web application would be unable to create these temporary files and is very likely to crash. If the disk space or inode quota limit is reached, you will also be unable to receive any new email messages, and the sender of the message will receive a bounce-back error that their message could not be delivered due to a full mailbox. That's why we strongly recommend you make sure there is always some free space on the account (at least 10%).

Checking your disk space/inodes usage

The Control Panel's Resources section is an invaluable tool for checking the disk space and inodes usage for your hosting account. There you will see a summary of the disk space and inodes usage for the main directories in your account (e.g. www, private, and backup), mailboxes, and databases. You can see detailed disk space/inode usage information in a tree view for a specific item by clicking on it.

"The tree view cannot be rendered due to too many items" error message

If there are too many items in a specific directory in your account, the tree view from the Control Panel's Resources section may not be displayed due to browser restrictions, and the following message will be displayed - "The tree view cannot be rendered due to too many items." In such cases, you can check the disk space/inode usage on your own via SSH using the commands listed below. Detailed instructions on how to connect to your hosting account via SSH are available in our SSH category. Alternatively, you can contact our support team for assistance.

Use the following command via SSH to check the current disk space usage for a specific directory in your account:

du -sBM * | sort -rn | head -n 20

The command will list the 20 biggest directories or files in the current directory. Next to each file or directory, you will see the size in MB, rounded up to the nearest megabyte.

To check the inodes usage for a specific directory, you can use this command:

for dir in `ls -d */`; do icount=$(find $dir | wc -l); echo "$icount - $dir"; done | sort -rn | head -n 20

The command will list the 20 directories with the highest number of inodes in the current directory.

Reducing disk space/inodes usage

Once you have determined what directories/files consume the most disk space or inodes, you need to find a way to reduce that usage. Most often the disk space and inode limits are reached due to outdated or unnecessary files, scripts, backups, or software applications.

You can remove directories/files or download them to a local device from your account if they are not necessary for the operation of your website. This can be done via the Control Panel's File Manager section or via FTP. Detailed instructions on how to connect to your account via FTP are available in the Uploading files category from our online documentation.

If an application or script is generating temporary files (e.g. session files) or backups without deleting them regularly, you should check the official documentation of that application or script for instructions on how to automatically delete the temporary files or backups after some time. For example, you can store session or temporary files in the /tmp folder on the server, and they will be deleted automatically. As for backups, we create full account (files, emails, and databases) backups twice per day, and we keep them for at least 7 days, so you may consider reducing the rate your scripts/applications are configured to back up your data.

In the event that your account reaches its disk space or inode limit due to messages in your mailboxes, you can find detailed instructions on how to reduce the disk space/inodes usage for your mailboxes in our Mail accounts over quota article.

It is possible to reach the disk space quota for your account if your databases take up too much disk space. You can inspect your database tables via the phpMyAdmin software. Instructions on how to access it are available in our Accessing phpMyAdmin article.

Upgrading

If you are unable to reduce your disk space/inodes usage, you should consider upgrading your account.

Notifications

By default, the system sends automatic notifications when a hosting account reaches 90% and 99% of its disk space quota, and 80% and 100% of its inode quota. These messages will be sent to the contact email address for your hosting account listed in the Control Panel's Account Profile section. You can disable or change the default notification value of 90% for disk space quota according to your personal preference via the Control Panel's Resources section. We would advise that you do not disable these notifications to ensure that your hosting account and its related services are always functioning properly.