My hosting account is out of disk space

Your website files, databases, email and backups all share your hosting plan’s disk space. There’s no separate limit on the number of files or the size of a mailbox, but when the disk space in your plan is used up, your services stop working properly.

You’ll be warned before it’s full

When your account is close to using all its disk space, we warn you in two ways:

• A notice in webmail when you log in.
• An email notification to your account’s contact email address.

Don’t ignore these warnings. Free up space or upgrade straight away, before your website and email are affected.

Signs your account is full

• Email bounces with “mailbox full” or “quota exceeded”, and you stop receiving new messages.
• You can’t upload images or files in WordPress or File Manager.
• WordPress, plugin or theme updates fail, often with “Could not create directory”. See Fixing “Could not create directory” in WordPress.
• Database errors, or your website shows errors or a blank page, because the database can’t save new data.
• Backups fail, and cPanel shows the disk usage bar in red.

Check your disk usage

1. Log in to cPanel.
2. Look at Disk Usage in the Statistics panel on the right of the home screen. It shows how much you’ve used out of your plan’s total.
3. To see which folders are biggest, open Disk Usage under Files. See Viewing disk usage information in cPanel.

Free up space

Start with the things that are usually biggest:

1. Old backups. Backup files (.zip, .tar.gz, .wpress) in your home folder, public_html, softaculous_backups or a plugin’s backup folder. Download any you want to keep, then delete them. Your account is still backed up automatically with JetBackup.
2. Email. Empty Trash and Spam, and delete old emails with large attachments. In cPanel, Email Disk Usage shows the biggest mailboxes and lets you delete old messages in bulk.
3. Website cache. Purge the cache in your caching plugin, for example LiteSpeed Cache.
4. Log files. Large error_log files in your website folders. Delete them, then fix the errors that fill them. See Finding PHP error logs.
5. Old or test websites you no longer use.
6. Databases. Old revisions, spam comments and logs in WordPress. See Optimizing WordPress database.

Deleted files in File Manager may go to the Trash first. Click View Trash → Empty Trash to free the space.

For a command-line way to find the biggest folders, see Determining high disk usage locations.

Need more space?

If your site has simply grown, upgrade to a bigger plan. It takes effect as soon as the invoice is paid, with no downtime and nothing to move. See Changing your billing cycle and upgrading your plan.

Related articles

• Managing the inode count
• Email sending and mailbox limits
• Website not working? Where to start