You've exceeded limits or would like to reduce storage usage

How to find what is taking up space

To determine what is taking up disk space:

1. Start by logging in to Plesk
2. Navigate to to the "Statistics" menu option to get a breakdown of bandwidth and storage.
3. Consult the pie chart entitled "Disk space" to get an idea of where your disk space has gone. Note that Backups here refers to Plesk backups, but not 1-click web apps backups.

Here, Plesk will be showing you where your storage is being used, such as in Mail, Logs, or Web. Proceed to Solution #1 below to learn how best to reduce any of these items' storage.

Solution #1: Remove Some Stuff

The first thing to check when you receive a storage alert is to see if you can remove some items from the server that are taking up space. This could be emails, files or most often, old backups.

If a lot of storage is used by Mail: use our guide to managing mail quota to help reduce your mail account usage.

If a lot of storage is used by Logs: (up to 50MB is normal), you can remove log files to clear up space! To examine the log files for the domain, complete these steps:

1. Log in to Plesk
2. Look for the domain with the exceeded storage limit and click the "See More" button at the bottom of its bounding box
3. Click on the "Logs" icon.
4. In the upper right corner where it says "All logs", click the arrow on the right, then choose "Manage Log Files".

Take a look at the Size column on the right to find larger than normal log files. Download all abnormally large files (> 5-10MB) to see if there are any recurring errors being logged as a large log file may indicate an error with your website or one of its plugins. If you spot any such errors, search Google for the parts of the error that don't include IPs or your domain to see if there's a solution to fixing the error then repair it to prevent it from being a problem again.

Once you've done this, select any particular large files by checking the box on the left and click the Remove button to clear up their space. Repeat for each domain in Plesk.

If you see more than 10 of each type of log file then it is suggested to limit the total number of files that are held by Plesk. This will prevent this problem from occurring in the future. To do this, choose the "Log Rotation" button at the top of the Logs screen. Set the maximum number of log files to 10 and click OK.

If a lot of storage is used by Web: this is either made up of large web app backups or simply large files/media that make up your site.

• Web App Backups: check for backups within 1-click web apps that you may not need by going to "Websites & Domains" in the Plesk menu, then choosing 1-click web apps, followed by the Backups tab. You may remove any older backups you don't require. Going forward, to avoid using storage within your hosting, you can configure your web app backups to store the backup data in cloud services like Dropbox or Amazon S3.
• Large Website Files:  If your site uses WordPress or another CMS like Joomla or Magento, consider removing old media from their Media managers provided within the admin panel for the app. If your site is purely HTML, you can use the Plesk File Manager to remove larger files.

You can use the Plesk File Manager to learn which folders/files are taking up the most space. You can select any folder (or all), then choose More > Calculate Size and it will update the "Size" column values (for each folder and file within) with their true size on disk. Then work your way down -- when you see one large folder, open it and repeat these steps to calculate the size of the folders within and repeat until you find where the big files are. You can then opt to save them to your computer and delete them if you don't think they're required for the operation of your site. You could also do Solution #2 below and upgrade your account for more storage.

Notes:

• These changes will take 24 hours to reflect space usage within Plesk and our Client Centre.
• There are some folders and files within your user root that are a fixed part of the account and cannot be removed. This is akin to the system files on your computer, phone or tablet which cannot be removed, but still take a small piece out of your overall storage.

Solution #2: Upgrade Your Account

This is definitely the simplest option! Just login to the Client Centre, click on Manage beside your hosting plan and click either the "Change Plan" button (for shared hosting) or the "Change Configuration" button (for VPS or Premium Mail) to upgrade your storage. Proceed through the order and your account will be upgraded either immediately or within a few hours (in certain circumstances manual upgrades are required).

Please note that a simple storage upgrade option is not available for those with Titanium Shared hosting plans. The 50GB Titanium storage limit is a hard limit as all servers now use solely SSD storage to ensure IO keeps up with our high performance web hosting promise. The trade-off when using SSDs is there is less overall capacity available for storing large files.

There are many solutions still available to help reduce your server-side storage and the best options will depend on where the majority of your current storage usage lies. Here's a few great options:

1. Move to your own VPS where your storage is configurable up to 200GB
2. Move large or all media files to Amazon S3. Here's an example of how to do this with a WordPress Plugin
3. Migrate your email to a dedicated email hosting service.
4. Configure Plesk to back up your site to a cloud storage solution and disabling local backup plugins like BackupBuddy