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.

cPanel has capabilities beyond what the owner of a website sees.  cPanel is not just for accounts on shared hosting or for end-users with a single site.

It provides browser-based tools for server administrators as well as for resellers where you control, automate and administer the server, including other people’s accounts, all via a web interface.  You can still administer the server using command line, logging in via SSH.

I mentioned dedicated hosting. There is also virtual private server (VPS) hosting.  VPS is between shared hosting and a dedicated server. A dedicated server gives you your own “box.”  You get full control over your settings, configuration and applications.  Scan down towards the bottom of this post for a brief discussion about why either might be a good option for you.

You might be surprised at how easy the move from shared hosting to VPS or dedicated server can be.  After using cPanel to work with a site at a shared hosting plan, you will have learned a lot about it and be comfortable.  When you move to a VPS or dedicated server, your knowledge of cPanel will simplify the step up in hosting.

Your current  hosting company may even offer dedicated hosting or VPS. They would be a good place to look first because they might even be able to help you move to the new plan.

Worth noting is Plesk is another leading control panel in addition to cPanel. I use cPanel and don’t cover Plesk here, but there is plenty of info to research it.

Reasons You May Have Outgrown Shared Hosting

• Your site gets a lot of traffic and needs more than basic processing power of a server that has 10,000 other sites running on it.
• You need specific settings or configuration to run your site or app that your hosting provider will not allow, or does not provide.
• You want to resell hosting to others to complement your core business. You might be a web developer, or graphic designer with clients and see an opportunity for more revenue.
• You want to get into the business of selling web hosting.
• Another customer on your current shared server got hacked and the hackers were able to bring down your site.

Before you upgrade anything, make sure you have backup copies …

This quote is from the WordPress readme.html file in the section “Upgrading Manually.”  Even if you use the automatic upgrader, back up your site and your database first. It’s always a good idea.

When you start to upgrade from within WordPress, you will see the highlighted message “Important: before upgrading, please backup your database and files.”  This link is to the official WordPress site that provides instructions about how to perform a backup. For cPanel users, the instructions say to use phpMyAdmin.  You can do this, but even easier is to use the cPanel “Backups” function.  Just look for the icon that I show in the top left of this post.

Whether your new web host will handle it all for you, it is wise to back up your site!

To do a full backup, log into cPanel and find the icon labeled “Backup Wizard”

Select the text button labeled “Backup –> ”  The next screen will give you the option of full or partial backup.

Select  ”Full Backup –> ” This will create a zipped copy of your entire site.  Note the text on the screen. This says that this will be a backup for moving to a new server.

On the next screen, you set up where to store the backup file that is created.  For “Backup Destination” keep the default “Home Directory” selection.

For the “Email Address” enter a valid email address and the server will email you when the backup is ready.

When the backup is complete, download the file by clicking on the link in the backup wizard where we left off (refresh your browser). Or you can log into your server via FTP and download it.

If you use FTP, go to your home directory. The file will be named in the form backup-1.27.2011_10-12-22_yoursite.tar.gz  where parts of the filename are separated by underscores. The first part of the filename is the date, the second part is a time stamp. The third is your site account name. “tar.gz” is file extension. (tar.gz means the file is a “tar ball” and  gzipped.)  Download this file to your desktop or laptop computer for a local copy of the file for safekeeping.

Contact your new hosting company for further instructions. Restoring a site from a full backup requires root access.  The important thing is that moving a site from a cPanel host to a cPanel host makes it easy for the hosting company which makes it easy for you.

However, if you do not check the account that is being forwarded, all of those emails will pile up until you reach your quota and the account “shuts down.”

You have several options:

1) Set up a cron job to regularly delete those emails (covered in my previous post “Cron Job to Clear Out an Overstuffed Email Inbox“ )  This is a more advanced solution.

2) Delete the  email address for the original account (requires logging into cPanel).  Then set up the forwarder.  Forwarders and email accounts are separate in cPanel. When you set up a forwarder that does not have the original email account created, cPanel will forward the mail without saving it on the server.  Caveat: I have not personally tried this approach, but have read about it in multiple places.

3) Set up an email filter.  This offers a secondary advantage in that it can be done at the account level (does not require cPanel log in permission).  You can use cPanel, but not required. Let’s say you do it at the email account level. Log into your email (the original account),  via Horde or your preferred UI.   In Horde, look for the icon along the top that says “Filters.”  In the “Rules,” section” select the option “Any header. ” Enter your original email address. In the “Actions” area, select “Redirect to email.” Enter the email address you want to forward the email to.  You have just set up cPanel to mimic forward and delete behavior.

I’ll have more about filtering in an upcoming post. This barely touches on what it can do for you.

I don’t use Outlook or download my email anymore because I prefer to leave it on the server where I can access it from any computer or mobile device. Let’s face it, cPanel’s email web interfaces (Horde, SquirrelMail and RoundCube) were nice years ago, but they are lousy on an iPhone and lack the features and power of Gmail.

You manage a number of sites and quickly get overrun with lots of email addresses.  Instead of trying to remember to checkmany email addresses, send all email to a single address that you check.

You want to keep your emails to conduct searches later but do not have enough disk space. Gmail offers a tremendous amount of free storage space where you can archive your emails.

Here is how to set up email forwarding. I assume the email address is already set up.

1. Log into cPanel. Look for the icon and link named  ”Forwarders.”  (Shown at the top of this post.)
2. Click the button “Add Forwarder.”
3. Fill in the address to forward. Then fill in the field where you want the email forwarded to.
4. Click the “Add Forwarder” button and you are done.

This is optional but also helpful:  in Gmail, you can set up powerful filters (“Settings” | “Filters”) to manage these emails do they do not all get dumped into one big inbox.

Forwarding email to another email address is a useful and powerful tool that helps simplify my life.

Get your  job to include useful info in the email that it sends you.  You can notifiy yourself of success or failure, or post details about the nature or results of the cron job.

Let’s say your cron job automatically IMs your boss with a random question every hour (like Wally did in this Dilbert comic strip):

Here’s the code snippet (PHP) that is part of your script run by cron. It lets you know whether your job worked or not, and what you IM-ed:

// check for success or failure

if (empty($buffer)) {

echo “failure”;

else {

echo “success — the IM message was: ” . $im;

}

My example uses  PHP, but the concept is the same if you use PERL, bash shell or whatever you prefer.

When you are working on localhost, the output will display on screen.  You can check and debug there. When you are on your server, the output will be part of the email the server sends you. That way your will have an email history of what you automatically IM-ed your boss and what time it went out.

Take a look at The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time:

From the moment people started using passwords, it didn’t take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If you see your password on this list, please change it immediately. Keep in mind that every password listed here has been used by at least hundreds if not thousands of other people.

There are some interesting passwords on this list that show how people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable.

Here is a handy random password generator that I use often.

Awhile ago I moved into a house that had a password protected security system. The previous owners did not provide the password. I was able to guess the password and was able to walk right into an unlocked house. That password was among the top 10. Though friends and family were amazed at my abilities, I had simply used what I knew was a common password. (I never told them my little trick that made getting in easy.)  Don’t let your email, website, or any online login be as wide open as that house was.

Click the AutoLoad link under your preferred webmail client and when you log in in the future, that webmail client will automatically load instead of giving you the option to select webmail client.

1. log into cPanel
2. look for File Manager and follow the link
3. you will get a window that says Please select a directory to open: and a number of options
4. select Web Root (public_html/www)
5. look at the far right column. It says Perms These are the file permissions for each file using the standard Unix file permissions numbering system
6. click the permissions for the file you want to change you can edit it right on the web page
7. click “OK”

In a nutshell, cPanel is giving you an easy interface for doing a chmod.
Unix and Unix-type file permissions appear quite cryptic at first but are easy to understand. More info at Linux File Permission Confusion and other sites you can google.