What to Do if I Receive an Email Regarding Disk Usage

To provide excellent hosting for all our Shared Hosting customers, we proactively monitor our servers' health by sending email regarding disk usage. By doing so, we are alerted to any hosting accounts that negatively impact a server's performance.

Think of a hosting server as an Olympic-size swimming pool. Not everyone needs an enormous, expensive, Olympic-size pool. So, for many, it's nice to have a smaller, more manageable, and affordable option.

With Shared Web Hosting, you can use the entire Olympic-size swimming pool; however, you must share it with other swimmers. This means you won't always enjoy the benefit of using the high dive because you may have to wait behind someone else while they dive. You won't always be able to swim laps without someone getting in your way. However, sometimes the number of swimmers may be very few (like in the middle of the night), and you have a little more privacy and room, but those other swimmers will surely be back, and they can come to swim in the same pool you use whenever they want. Also, the pool owner, which would be Bluehost in this case, may have rules like no running, no bringing your entire extended family to take up the entire pool, and not leaving room for anyone else. You might get splashed if someone does a cannonball, but the disturbance would be temporary. If that swimmer continually does cannonballs and disturbs other swimmers, then that swimmer would be asked to stop doing cannonballs or get their own pool.

If you received a courtesy email regarding your account's disk usage, your hosting account is that person doing repetitive cannonballs or bringing their entire extended family to the pool. You may not even be aware of how your hosting account is affecting others on the server. That's why we are reaching out to you to actively resolve the concerns before more drastic measures may need to be implemented. We want you and others to swim successfully in the Olympic-size pool.

If you recently received a courtesy email notification about your account's disk usage, we are proactively reaching out to you as your account will or is currently impacting others on the server. Follow the instructions below to walk you through where to find your current resource usage for disk space, databases, and inodes. We will provide some suggestions on how to reduce your shared account usage that is considered outside of Bluehost's General Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, followed by what to expect next after addressing your disk usage.

• What is your current usage?
• Suggestions to reduce disk usage
• What's next?
• Summary

What is your current usage?

Before addressing any concerns with disk space, databases, and inodes, you'll want to find your current usage on your account. Keep in mind that although we do not place strict limits on the disk space usage for Shared accounts, we do ask that your usage be kept as minimal as possible. Database tables should not exceed 5,000 tables, nor should the database size exceed 10GB total or 5GB for a single database, and inodes should not exceed 200,000 per section 15 of the Resource Usage of Bluehost 's General Terms of Service.

The following instructions will help you find your account's disk space, MySQL Databases, and inode usage.

Disk Space Usage

1. Log in to your Bluehost Account Manager.
2. Click the Hosting tab from the side navigation.
   
3. Under Quick Links, click on cPanel.
   
4. Under the Files category, click the Disk Usage icon.
   
5. You can view a list of disk usage by directory and the total disk space used.
   
6. Take note of the directories that show high disk usage.

MySQL Databases

1. While on the Disk Usage page, scroll down to find MySQL listed under Location and click on it.
   
2. You will be redirected to the MySQL Databases page.
3. Under Current Databases, there will be a list of all the databases in your account, along with their size.
4. Take note of which databases have the largest file sizes.

How to Analyze File Sizes in Public_html

1. While in cPanel, look for the search bar at the top right and enter Disk Usage.
   
2. To see which files are taking up the most space, scroll down to the Directories section and click the public_html dropdown.
   

Inodes Usage

Suggestions to reduce disk space, databases, and inode usage

To address the usage of your hosting account that impacts the server's health, you must remove content from your hosting account. Before doing so, we strongly recommend that you back up your files and database(s) to your local computer. For more information on how to do this, please see Jetpack - Backup and Restore or Restoring Backups with CodeGuard.

Removing files and folders will improve, or in this case, reduce your disk space and inodes usage. You can use your account's File Manager or Intro to FTP to remove content. Using Softaculous and the WordPress Dashboard will be needed if you have a WordPress site.

Suggestions to reduce usage

1. Remove all files and folders that you don't need. Your hosting account should only have files and folders used for your active website(s)
2. Remove any WordPress installations that you're no longer using.
3. Remove old backups from your hosting account.
4. Do not use backup plugins. Many WordPress backup plugins are stored in the File Manager, which can lead to compromised files, data loss, and full space. Depending on the plugin's settings, see if you can change the backups to be stored in a third-party file storage location or locally on your computer. You will want to save any backups on your hosting account to your local computer and remove them from the server.
5. If you are using WordPress, deactivate and delete any plugins and themes that you are not using.
6. Review any media used for your website and remove items that are no longer needed.
7. If your inode usage is high and you use Bluehost's webmail, clean out your email folders, such as junk/spam and trash. Email is a file that counts towards the inode usage on your hosting account. Consider switching to professional email – as the professional emails are not saved within File Manager.

What's next?

After removing files and folders, check your account's usage to see how the changes have affected your account compared to what you originally had listed. If there's a substantial reduction in disk usage and your account complies with Bluehost's General Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, you should be good. If a concern remains, we will contact you with another courtesy email. Failure to address disk usage will result in account restrictions. If the content in your Shared hosting account is vital for your website and you're unable to reduce your disk usage, we recommend that you upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated Server to meet your hosting and usage needs.

Summary

In summary, proper control of disk usage is fundamental to your account's proper performance and compliance with hosting policies on Bluehost. To this end, adhering to the steps detailed above will help you manage your disk space, database, and inodes much more closely and reduce utilization accordingly. This will generally minimize the impact to performance on the server for others.