Overview:

If you have noticed that your Disk Usage has exceeded its allowed limit, you may be unable to investigate nor make any changes as cPanel is unable to write new data when it is entirely full.  In this case, please contact our Micron21 Support team via email and we can apply a temporary disk space increase on your behalf for 24 hours. In the email request, please ensure to include the primary domain name so that we can increase the correct service.

Method:

1. Log into your cPanel web hosting environment.

2. Navigate to the "Disk Usage" tool under the "Files" tab.

   1. Using the "Disk Usage" tab allows you to see an overview of what areas are consuming the most data. The two most common areas are: Email Accounts - which stores your email data; and public_html - which stores your website data.

   2. For a granular look at your file structures disk usage, you can use the drop-down items at the bottom of the page - which will allow you to navigate through your files and see the size of each file as you move through them.

Minimising data in your email accounts:

If your Email Accounts are using a majority of your disk space, you will want to archive or delete any old or unnecessary emails from your larger email accounts. You can also clear space in bulk, following our guide. Alternatively, you can upgrade the cPanel service to a larger plan, or migrate the email accounts to dedicated email hosting services, such as Micron21 Hosted Exchange.

Minimising data in the public_html directory:

If your public_html directory is using a majority of your disk space, there a number of possible reasons. Navigating through the directory using the "Disk Usage" tool in cPanel will help you find the largest files and you can review them to see if they can be removed.

Common files that can be removed are backup files generated by plugins, such as Updraft, which are saved locally to your cPanel and are not being automatically deleted after a certain time. It’s best to configure any backup plugins to store data remotely and to automatically delete old data after a certain amount of time automatically.

Sometimes you may have some plugins or codes that are generating a lot of errors which then get logged to your "error_log" and sometimes if it is not monitored the error log can grow to an enormous size.  Deleting the error log is usually okay as most content management systems, such as WordPress will create a new file if any other errors occur. Though, it is good practice to save the last 20-30 lines of your error log before deleting it so that you can review possible issues.