How to manage storage space usage in cPanel

Introduction

Any Web hosting offer has its limitations when it comes to storage space usage. Whether it's the number of inodes or the total amount of storage used, users often struggle to keep the size of their account within reasonable limits. Thanks to cPanel can be any user get an appropriate distribution of the size for each folder in its web hosting account. In the following lines of this tutorial we will examine the cPanel "Disk Usage" feature and show how it can be used to reduce the size of a cPanel-based web hosting account.

Access to the Memory Usage function

To access the "Disk Space Usage" feature, you must first log in to the cPanel service. We have published a complete tutorial on this topic, where you can find detailed information on "Access to cPanel" find

The function "Storage Space Usage" is located in the first function group "Files". When you have found it, please click on it to continue with the tutorial.

You will be redirected to a new page where you can get more information about the Storage Usage feature.

Reading the disk space usage of your web hosting account

The "Disk Space Usage" interface is kept quite simple. It is divided into two large sections. The first section gives a general overview of the size of the first level directories contained in the user's home directory.

The first two fields are the most important:

Files in the home directory - Here you can see the total size of all files located directly in the home directory of your account. Please note that this value does not take into account the files in the internal folders, but only the files located in your home directory. If the value in this field is high compared to the other fields, it means that there are large files in your home directory. Usually these are manual backups created for your account or if you have uploaded large archives.

Files in hidden subdirectories - Your web hosting account also contains some hidden directories. In a typical UNIX-based operating system, such files are identified by a dot (".") right before their name. If the value of this field is greater than 1 GB, we strongly recommend that you check the ".trash" folder of your web hosting account, as there are probably some deleted files there.

As mentioned earlier, the other fields in this table view refer to the first level of folders in your Home directory. If any of these folders seem suspiciously large to you for any reason, please contact us so we can determine the cause of the excessive disk space usage.

You have probably noticed that each folder is displayed by its name. When you click on the name of a folder, an instance of the cPanel File Manager opened with this folder. This is done for your convenience so that you can quickly check the contents of a folder that seems unusually large.

In addition to the folders listed, you will also find information about the disk space usage of "MySQL" and "Email accounts". Use this information to manage your MySQL databases and clean up email accounts.

Please note that you need to be extra careful when deleting these folders, as most of them are used by the cPanel service. If you delete the entire contents of a folder, it may cause the cPanel service to become unavailable for your web hosting account. If you want to avoid this risk, you should submit a support ticket and our support team will help you clean up these folders.

In-depth review of hard disk usage

If you scroll down, just below the first large table you will find a second, smaller table that is used for a detailed analysis of storage usage for your account.

Here you can view the memory usage not only for the first level directories, but also for all other directories of your entire web hosting account. The only statistics missing from this table are those for MySQL and email, but since these are included in the previous table, they are not needed here.

As you probably noticed, each folder can be expanded to show all inner folders. For each of these folders, the disk space usage is displayed in MB (megabytes) and in bytes.

Another important point is that clicking on the name of a directory does not expand it. Instead, you must click on the angle directly in front of the directory name. On the other hand, clicking on the name of a directory opens the cPanel file manager and displays the contents of that directory for you to review and clean up.

Congratulations, you now know how to fully view the disk space of your web hosting account so that you can better understand how the size of your account comes about and how to reduce it when it is exhausted. If you have any difficulties cleaning up your web hosting account, please contact our technical support, to discuss how to clean up your account.