“Disk Space Usage” functionality in cPanel is a handy way to help you determine what files are taking up so much space. It can be hard to track down where the problem is because your total usage includes email, databases, log files and more in addition to the files associated with your website.
You may have received an automated email from your web hosting provider that you are using too much disk space.
The subject of the email will be something like ”Disk Usage Warning critical” and “Disk Usage Warning warn” and the contents of the email will be like this:
The account with the username ‘yoursite’ (yoursite.com), is running out of disk space.
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.
This account has used 97.19% (150.86 Megs) of its allocated disk space.
Some web hosts will disable your site after you exceed your allocated space and do not remove any files.
You also might be seeing signs of impending problems. On the left side of the screen where you log in, the “Stats” area displays something like this, or (even worse), a red bar.
cPanel’s disk usage area is the first place to start looking.
How to Track Down Excessive Disk Usage
Click the link “Disk Space Usage” and look at the graph shown to get an idea where to look first. You will see something like this example:
This one is relatively easy. Here, there is not a lot of email (though be aware that email is a common problem).
Scroll down the page and you can start to use the nice interface to drill down and identify where the problem is. You will see a summary list of directories with how much space files in that directory, plus files in sub-directories are taking up.
Select “Sort directories by: disk usage.” This will make it easier to drill down to where the files are. Click the + next to any directory and that directory will expand, like this, where I clicked next to public_html:
Keep clicking the + to continue expanding and looking around. In this example, I would click on the “wp-content” directory and discover that I had numerous un-used WordPress themes that I could delete.
Note that disk usage numbers are commonly updated once per day. After deleting some files, check back the next day to see if you made an improvement. Also note that This post updates an older post from 2006 before the current “Disk Space Usage” functionality was in place. It it now easier to solve disk usage problems.
Written by Toby
Topics: Managing Files, Troubleshooting