Bobcares.com provides Server Support to Web hosts and other hosting providers.

And as part of our services, we also resolve technical support queries posted by hosting users on a daily basis.

Recently, we had the following query posted to us :

Our experts at Bobcares were able to identify that due to the temporary files, the customer’s account quota was almost full and it was causing the problem with restore function.

What is ‘Account is full, Quota exceeded’ error?

Each hosting account has a space limit or a quota. It could vary depending on the plan and package chosen for each domain.

So, the user can store files, databases, mails etc., as long as the total usage doesn’t exceed the defined quota. But if the usage exceeds the allocated space, they get the ‘Account is full, Quota exceeded‘ message.

Some of the issues that come along with this are –

• File upload may not work
• Mail delivery may get affected
• Control panel functionalities may fail
• Backup and restore functions may not operate

What are the reasons for ‘Account is full, Quota exceeded’ error?

We’ve seen that many a times, account owners are not totally aware of what is using up their hosting space.

The account could be filled with old backups, mails, database dumps, temporary files etc., which tend to occupy a lot of space.

Over the years, we have seen the common causes for this problem as :

1. Old backups

Sometimes a user may have to access the backup archives to retrieve a file or two. What we have generally seen in such cases is that, they forget to delete the unnecessary uncompressed files after taking the required ones.

So they unintentionally add a lot of files which hog space.

We have resolved quota issues where such backups have accounted for over 70% of the disk space.

2. Email attachments

Sometimes users may retain email for a long time. Some of these may even have large attachment files like video, images etc. These are not usually deleted because they may be required for references later on.

But they can take up a large portion of disk space.

We resolve this issue by setting up auto download of all mails older than 3 months, or by setting up a collaboration suite where mails and mail threads are always accessible over a web interface and so on.

3. Uncleared Spam and Trash folder

Accounts can get flooded with spam mails.Although each spam may take up only a little space, if they are not deleted, their combined usage can exceed the total allocated space.

This is generally the case for customers who use the Spam quarantine feature.

For such customers we recommend automatic deletion of spam mails.

And for those who wish to review the spam mails, we set up mail directory expiry settings, so that only spam mail older than 30 days gets deleted automatically.

Sometimes deleted files end up in Trash folders and keep on occupying space. To make more space available for our customers, we purge the Trash folder to release disk space.

4. Database dumps

Website developers usually take backup of database before they upgrade an app. We have seen such accumulated database dumps taking up around 50% of the disk space.

These can be cleared to reclaim the space.

5. Temporary files

Some applications store session files in /tmp. Usually these files are automatically deleted. But in the situation when applications crash mid-execution,these files remain in ‘tmp’ directory, and cause a space overage.

We prevent such issues by using an automated /tmp cleaner.

6. Log files

We have seen that over time, log files can accumulate and can use up all the available disk space.

In such cases, we reconfigure the logging feature to rotate the logs out so that excessively large files are not created on a regular basis.

7. Old sub-domains

Certain hosting administration tools allow creation of multiple domains under the same hosting account. We’ve seen unused sub-domains with many apps stealing away all the space from a working domain.

Conclusion

Today we discussed about the various reasons for the ‘Account is full, Quota exceeded’ message and how we fix them at Bobcares.